


Giorni di Sangue e di Polvere (Days of Blood and Dust)

by CateyedCrow



Category: Trilogia del dollaro | Dollars Trilogy
Genre: Gen, Western
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-03
Updated: 2015-05-03
Packaged: 2018-03-28 22:07:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 27,834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3871453
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CateyedCrow/pseuds/CateyedCrow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everybody knows Bloodworth and his gang have a fortune in gold and bills stashed at his hideout somewhere outside the town of Clifton Mesa. Santa Fe Jack and his gang know that especially. They've been trying to get it forever without any success and Clifton Mesa hasn't known peace since. That's why Santa Fe Jack got himself the hired gun nicknamed "Preacher"--fast as he is, maybe he can win the fight. But that's also about when two strangers turn up in town: the brazen thief nicknamed "El Gato" and a stranger nobody seems to know. They might not say it, but they're after the money too. It's just too bad El Gato was as drunk as he was when he tried to join up with Bloodworth's gang--maybe he could have gotten in too, instead of just that stranger. So now all they have to do to get their shares of the money is get it to Bloodworth's brother over in Santa Ana. That would be a lot easier if Santa Ana wasn't on the other side of Santa Fe Jack's territory and if they were the only ones after the money...</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Journeystory's Big Bang project with the bonus challenge of "write it Cormac McCarthy-style." This story is very much in the tradition of Sergio Leone's "Dollars" trilogy and, in my mind, is set in between "A Fistful of Dollars" and "For a Few Dollars More." So, in that spirit: Clint Eastwood would be cast as The Amigo, Gian Maria Volonte as El Gato, and Lee Van Cleef as The Preacher. It's not as good as a Leone Western, but I had a lot of fun writing it, so I hope you'll have fun reading it.

When the man called "El Gato" arrived in the town of Clifton Mesa, he was not needed.

El Gato was a vulture and a thief and a magpie of a creature who circled trouble until the trouble had passed and then he sought to fill his belly on the scraps and remains that had been left behind. When there was something to steal he could steal it and he was proud of his as any tradesman proud of his skill hangs out his sign to prove it so and beckons any in to see the proof upon his anvil or under his plane. But El Gato was a thief and he was named in his younger days for his way of walking across the terracotta roof tiles of the houses in cities and towns wherever he wandered like a cat himself. And like a cat himself he could slip through railings and bars on windows and through locks on doors and nothing could be said to be completely safe from his hands. His face was known and he did not care because he did his work in the dark and no one could know where he passed and what he did and they would only see that he had been there and what he has done there but none would see him so do. There was no proof but there were stories and he had had them told to him by those who did not know him and he laughed. He still clambered on rooftops and pulled apart the tiles shaped out of red earth to find his way out of the night and into the darkness inside this house or that one. But now he was known because he could shoot and he could fight and he knew the mechanics of locks that used keys or locks that used wheels or locks that used any number of contrivances balanced out of gears and tumblers and corkscrew springs that went spinning in the darkness in between what was had and those who wanted it in those moments before what was hidden was revealed and it still remained near infinite in the darkness. He wore silver rings on any finger that could hold them so long as they did not interfere with his getting of more silver or, better yet, of gold. He could open anything with his kit of delicate tools and his jars of acids. And when he opened something he would take his share and this was how he made his way across the deserts and why he had come to Clifton Mesa.

The city was like so many in that same region kept alive by whatever ore or mineral or roots or blood could be dug out of the ground and feed or taken from at odd times by the railroad where the hulking iron steam engines balanced on the twin spires of the railroad tracks until both tracks and train dwindled and withdrew into themselves to their narrow focus at the terminus of the horizon. The town was fed by the railroad and unto that railroad did it give of itself in the hopes of some sustenance, though little was to come. It was rawboned and rough, the shambled structures raised out of lumber hauled to that place by the railroad before the place was a place and then set up again and shingled in a day or an afternoon. And now they were sustained in their sagging shapes by another nail or another plank and the rows of them faced one another across streets of dry dust or sodden mud like the sunbeaten and leathern faces of rivals now too old to fight but yet with eyesight to see and the windows of the upper rooms glowered like hollow eyesockets from either side of the wide ways. The old structures were dark and brown and silver with age and season, and the new ones were raw and pale and smelled of sap and of cut wood. But a year or two in this place with its climes and its temperament would dry and gray even the brightest plank down to the same exhausted shade as all its neighbors. And so the place was raised of wood in a place of dust and rock where no tree as newcomers to this place would think of trees could grow but a town of wood had still be cultivated in that place and cut trees had been raised up again in roofbeams and in walls in abject disregard of the nature of the place. And it was through these narrow streets that the man called El Gato guided his horse and looked around him and was to learn that he was no longer needed.

This town was a town without a master and without a leader whether he should be chosen from amongst its own citizenry or set down among them from some order or risen up from within or without to rule this small place where it lay sprawled in its dusty plain. Instead there were two who would rule and where there were two to rule there would be none to rule.

Two men had come upon the town from their respective horizons and each had decided that the town would suit them. And for a time they had lived quietly in the way that thieves and killers will live quietly for even wolves will keep a kill away from their own den so as to discourage other scavengers and to keep near to them whatever else their sharp teeth and taste for blood might demand. There were two men and they were called by names that were not their names: Bloodworth and Santa Fe Jack. 

Bloodworth it was often said had been a gentleman and was one yet. For bloodshed he was said not to have such a taste save for when such an act was unavoidable or particularly desirable. He was, it was said, a man of taste and wealth. He was perhaps then more clever than one would suspect so as to avoid such a thing. But he was yet a thief and a murderer and kept the towns in such parts of the desert and the plains and the hills as he considered his in fear of him and collected from them dues owed for his protection and so carried out his robbery with care and courtesy. It was said widely and without whispering that he kept a woman and his son in a house he had had built at a spring in the desert somewhere beyond this town along with a strongbox of all the bills and coin he had ever collected over the course of the years of his work. This was known and this was said and this was believed even if no one had ever seen woman or son or coin. Of the house had many seen and its place was known to all and to approach was to court death with the sharpness of eyes that hid behind shutters and in shadows and one did so only advisedly. Of the money and woman and son, this was believed and this was enough. And in such belief he had accumulated a following of men loyal either to him or to his gold but loyal enough.

Santa Fe Jack had been given his name when he came out of Santa Fe. He had not been born there and claimed his youth in some other country far further to the east in some hill in Missouri first but later in Colorado. But his name came of the bloodshed he had orchestrated in Santa Fe against two brothers and their plan to steal from caravans and banks and railroads alike. There was no honor among thieves to this man Jack. But he had collected about himself a following of men equally scarred and equally bloody-minded and equally with such a taste for mindless violence and so he established himself and roamed the desert claiming territory for his own with this army of his own. And they were loyal to him and wore such a uniform as he would have designed so that anyone who saw them knew who they were and who they served. He himself forever wore a long brown coat brushed with dust and ragged in shape but of such a length that it would fly about him when he rode and so too then did his men and so they were known. It was also known though that it had been Bloodworth's men and not Santa Fe Jack's gang who had shot and killed the sheriff of Clifton Mesa not three months before.

Bloodworth then held the lands and towns to the east of Clifton Mesa inasmuch as one can hold such places and Santa Fe Jack held those to the west. In Clifton Mesa there was peace but only such as could last when one gang held power and the other was hidden away and licking its wounds or when both were wandering yet again. This was the course of life. The people of the town who swore no allegiance to either or perhaps only swore to the one presently in control of house and home and street had learned quickly how to shut up their windows and bar their doors and treat the wounds left by pistol and rifle. There was nowhere for them to go and they were sustained by one master or the other as each took his turn in command. And so the people of Clifton Mesa were cowed, herded quietly from one master to the other by that master's men who were like so many barking dogs with sharp teeth they need only bare to hurry the sheep. And this was the town of Clifton Mesa.

El Gato came into the town then to ply his trade in the afternoon when the sunlight was still more white than gold and the shadows of the town and all that was in it poured darkly onto the street from one side and pulled darkly away from the other.

He led his horse to a rail and tied it there among others in the quiet street and stepped up the low wooden stairs into the shadow cast from the raw board structure above him.

He paused without the saloon and considered the coin in his pockets and hidden in his shoes and tucked into the pouch tied about his neck and at last pushed apart the loose doors and entered a place where all was darkness and without definition after the brightness of the street. There were no lamps lit in the afternoon light which spilled from windows and door alike into the room and in the shadows dark figures sat smoking. He made his way across a room wainscoted with varnished boards and came to the bar. It was topped with zinc and he set his elbows and then his coin on it. The place reeked of smoke and sweat and the dried ghosts of things spilled within it. A man in a gaitered shirt approached him from behind the bar with some ceremony and set his hands on the bar across from his and looked at the rings on El Gato's fingers and took his coin and asked what he would want.

\--Whiskey, he answered.

He grinned and then looked around the room from under his eyebrows to see the whites of the eyes of the other men in this same place looking at him from across their tobacco and their glasses and their cards. They wore red cloths around their necks and arms and waists and some were tied like kerchiefs and some were long and hung like scarves and some became sashes or armbands but every man bore this same mark as though stained with blood in protection or in omen or in token and it was by this that El Gato knew that he had come to the town he had sought.

When the glass came he drank its contents and set down another coin and held up one finger to signal for more. This was not the first whiskey he had drunk that day though its predecessor had been in greater quantity and poorly made and quickly drunk and this glass now was far better by virtue of those others who patronized this place and this town even now. And El Gato was not surprised by this. This was a town built on the leavings and dropped wealth of those who had wealth and though the town cowered behind barred doors in the midst of the brief and furious battles between the two factions that swept over the town from time to time they still sought out the hands that bore the gold and hoped that these hands would drop it to them. And this had become this town's trade more than any other ore or root or blood to be dug from the earth itself.

The second glass was in his hand as he turned away from the bar to face those other worthies in the place with him. 

There were some standing yet at the bar with their feet on the brass rail and some were looking at him without concern. Others sat gathered in groups of two or three at tables stained and ringed from long use and innumerable glasses. Their smoke lifted up around their ears and their eyes and hung in shapes incorporeal and haunting above their heads before it dispersed into the air and to the stains of the ceiling. Farther in there were three men gathered at a table for cards but they were idle. The coin from their previous game lay at the place where their fourth player should be and the coin for their next game lay waiting in the center of the table and one among them was shuffling the tattered cards aimlessly but he did not deal or did they hail El Gato as a fourth to their game. They smoked and were silent amongst themselves.

Still bearing the tumbler in his fist El Gato swaggered towards them. He was not drunk for any reason save for the pleasure of being drunk. It pleased him. And it made him feel larger. And it made him feel strong. But the men at the table still did not hail him but only looked at him. He set the tumbler on the table and pulled the empty chair towards him.

\--You are in need of a fourth man. I will play.

\--You weren't invited, one of them answered and looked at him only aside. 

The man bearing the stacked cards cut and shuffled the deck slowly and watched the pattern of alternating corners as they lay, each in their place, in the newly remade deck. He did not deal the cards.

El Gato smiled then instead and showed all his shining white teeth in the dimness of the place and pulled the unoffered chair closer to him and sat in the empty place at the table. He bent his elbows on the edge of it and cupped his hands together as though around a struggling flame or a secret.

\--Didn't you hear?

\--I have heard, he said, that the man who pays you will pay others of great skill. His smile fell for the sake of gravity and then rose again for the sake of pride and he went on. I am one such as that.

The three men regarded each other quietly and with due consideration not of the offer, such as it was, that had been laid before them but of some other understanding that moved among them mutely and without movement and that understanding lay already in their faces when they turned their eyes back to this newcomer. He did not see and he did not understand. And this was his own misfortune.

\--He ain't hiring.

\--But he will hire me. And he laughed again. There is no lock which I cannot undo. There is no place into which I cannot go. He would be better to pay me and be certain that I am with him than to let me loose and to spend every night awake and afraid.

\--He ain't afraid either.

There was a low rattle of laughter then that moved among the others in the dramhouse as all ears had turned towards this table and these words.

El Gato leaned across the table and kept himself crouched there very like unto a cat once again.

\--I think he should be.

The man with the cards held his hands still though the deck was cut and lay half in each hand. He looked at the cards where they lay unmoved but spoke to El Gato.

\--You got some reason he might ought to be?

El Gato swallowed what remained in the tumbler in his fist and coiled in half-spirals his longer fingers in their silver rings around the shape of the glass and used it then as a pointer and as a prop by which to emphasize his words. He was still and always smiling.

\--I am the smartest and I am the fastest. At anything. There is nothing El Gato cannot do.

\--That so?

\--Do you wish a demonstration? I will oblige you.

He took off his widebrimmed hat and set it on the table in front of him. He set the empty glass down beside it. Each of the other men in the place began to find with his fingertips the stock of his weapon and to rest what fingers or palm he chose on the same. El Gato did not reach for his weapon. He was very quick because it was his trade. Before anyone else could move or think to move, he took from one man at that table his hat and from another his cigar. He put the hat on his head and he put the cigar between his teeth and he pulled at the cigar and its smoke for a moment and he pushed the hat down over his eyes and he was satisfied with his display. The man with the deck of cards yet under his hands let fall each into its place as he flexed the corners and shuffled them again. And how like the speed of El Gato was this movement among these cards as each flickered almost faster than the eye. But still, at the end, it was clear that things now were no longer as they were. And men are not cards and these things were no longer at rights. These things had been stolen and an offense had been made.

An altercation took place. How these things end. In confusion and curses and blood. He had run afoul of others and things were done that could not be put right again. The men at the table stood up. El Gato was on his feet, swaying. The chair in which he had been sitting turned over behind him. The men reclaimed their possessions from him. The cigar was tossed aside and crushed under its owner's bootheel. The first blows were for the men at this table for the offense done them, or so proceeded their understanding. El Gato made to defend himself but he was drunk and his defense was poor where it stood at all. The men he had offended did not seek true injury on him and they shoved him and pulled at his clothes and struck him across the face. He fell across a table which fell with him and the tumbles and glasses on that table shattered around him in bright shards like clear and broken ice. He found his feet again but could do nothing. He was herded then back to the loosely swinging doors of the establishment and was pushed then from his precarious balance from under the roof of the place and down the wooden steps and into the sunlight and dust in the street. 

The men he had wrong turned to one another and went inside the dramhouse door again. El Gato was left in the street where he drew himself to his feet again and cursed them for a time. But they did not answer him nor did they pay him any attention. He shouted at them and he railed at them and he threatened them but there was no answer given him and he began to look a madman in the street

After a time he was wearied and he wanted for more whiskey but knew he could not take it there. He left the doorway of this dramhouse and found a merchant who would sell him the same so long as his coin was good. And this he drank that long evening as he stalked the streets of Clifton Mesa and cursed darkly under his breath the men whom he had set out to join but who had told him that he was no longer needed.

He would crawl under the porch of a house later that evening for want of shelter and then spend that night still drunk in a hovel of a barn and surrounded by the horses and animals of the place. He would stay there for the next day and the next evening in kind and still cursing these same men. But the following day he would be awoken by the sound of horse and rider and gunfire.


	2. Chapter 2

El Gato was not the only man to come into this town in search of these same men and their leader. Another man with less of a name than the appellation bestowed on El Gato had ridden from his respective horizon too into town. 

He rode his horse slowly with his head down under his flatbrimmed hat the color of the pale dust in that country and with his eyes narrowed by the sun. He smoked as he rode, those stunted cigarillos seen more in countries farther south but carried up with him in some pocket it would seem and he let the smoke hang around him as he rode. He sat his horse and he looked around the town of Clifton Mesa through his narrowed eyes and from the back of that desert-beaten but enduring horse and it was apparent to those who saw him what his trade was and that this vagabond could in no length of time set himself up to sell lead in exchange for gold.

Like El Gato would do after him, he had tied up his horse amongst others of its kind and had weighed out his coin and come into the darkness of the same place and had spoken his wants to the man at the bar and had drunk in the company of the silent men whose eyes glittered white and dark in the weak light that crept into that place from the street and from the glass of the windows in the places beyond it.

He had said nothing and had kept the place quiet for them all to drink in. And after a time the men with their red rags and battered boots and hats in different shapes had come around him as though they were truly the dogs of the town sniffing some newly-arrived half-breed desert wolf that had wandered into town and had sought some rest or companionship amongst them. The man had allowed this though all and he included had kept visible the pistols and revolvers they each and all carried as weights and signs on their hips. And things were understood amongst them as they looked at one another from under the rims of their hats. He made no move towards his weapon and they made no move towards theirs and so the same peace that stood so often in Clifton Mesa stood in its saloon too.

He had set them up to drinks and paid willingly though not gladly. They spoke to him and he answered. They began to tell stories amongst themselves at first and then to him and perhaps he smiled and that satisfied them. And they asked after his trade and he answered. And because his trade was like theirs but because he had not yet moved his hand against them one among them stole away and went up the stairs and stayed there a while and then returned again and spoke to one of the men sitting at the table. The man nodded but said nothing. 

A man got up from the table at which four had been playing cards and went out of the saloon again. The three men left without a fourth for their game beckoned to him with small gestures to which he answered and they set to play a hand and he smoked with them while they and all the others in the room looked at him.

After a while another man came from upstairs and walked across the dramhouse room and came to the newcomer at the table and offered his hand. He was thin and dark and kept his mustaches and hair slicked dark and close to his skin. He was dressed in a suit of of gray linen and wore new polished boots. His coat was unbuttoned and in his waistcoat of damask he carried a watchchain and about his waist he wore the same weapon that he and all the men about him wore and here it signified his trade. About his neck was a tie of red silk and the man new the reason for it. He offered the newcomer his hand though this hand was branded with letters from an earlier time and an earlier way of life. The man took the offered hand and shook it as a token and greeting but nothing further.

\--Bloodworth, the man in the gray suit said by way of introduction.

The newcomer looked at him in understanding but did not offer a name. 

\--I hear you're hiring on men, he said at last.

\--I am.

\--I might just be available.

Bloodworth regarded him critically as one might regard a horse for sale and the man endured it and stood against the felt-topped table and considered Bloodworth in his own right. Bloodworth answered then having concluded his considerations.

\--Come upstairs. We'll talk.

The newcomer left his companions at cards though he turned his hand over for them to see and they acknowledged his victory at that hand and pushed the coin and paper dollars over to his side of the table and left it there in stacks and crumpled folds to wait for his return. He turned to see the spoils of his victory for a moment from over his shoulder before he and Bloodworth both turned up the stairs to the landing and were gone again down the rows of narrow rooms in which Bloodworth was at present keeping his office in town.

In the interval, another stranger came into the saloon but he was rebuffed by the others there for his drunkenness and he was forced out of the place and back into the street where he wandered away again and was forgotten by most all of them. Of his arrival and departure both the newcomer and Bloodworth had only vague ideas from shouts and calls. Neither came down to answer to it. 

When the newcomer came downstairs again he was along and he wore a long red cloth cut and torn from the curtains or the bedclothes or some sacrificial coat or dress there in those rooms where agreements of any number were made and broken. He twisted it around his neck and let it hang across his shoulder and the men at the bottom of the stairs now looked at him in greeting and as one of their own.

He returned to the felt-topped table and to the cards that lay there and put his share into the game and sat down. The man with the cards cut the deck and fluttered the cards crosswise against one another and let them rattle into the order they pleased and dealt each man his new hand.

One man pulled a cigar from between his teeth with great ceremony and spat on the floor and then spoke:

\--Too bad you weren't down here a little while ago.

\--Why's that?

\--Another stranger came in here.

The man dealing the cards replied then:

\--He'd better not go to Jack.

\--That drunk?

\--The drunk stranger.

\--Jack won't take him either. Not drunk or sober. 

The third spoke:

\--Jack's hired the Preacher. Gomez's been spreading the word.

\--And you gonna believe Gomez?

\--Preacher, the man said without suggestion of implication but merely as a set of sounds.

\--If you don't know about the Preacher you got to be new around these parts.

\--I know of him, the man answered and cut his narrowed eyes to one side and looked at no man and no one was sure if his answer was a lie or the truth but no one wanted to ask. He moved the cards in his hand to lie as he liked them and paid into the pile of coin in the center of the table as he knew was required of him in the course of the game and said no more.


	3. Chapter 3

He was called "Preacher" for his dark suit of clothes and the black flatcrowned hat he always wore and for the bible he carried and read or held as though to read though whether the words of the book reached him none could say. He was witness to no man, neither of things that had been nor things at hand nor things to come, he least of any man. He would bear witness only of another's death and of this he would not speak. He had ridden into the desert to hang a man for accusations of robbery and it had pleased him to see the knot poorly tied and to consider the means by which this meant that this man would meet his end. He had stayed near to the withered tree to which the robber was tied and he had moved through the desert heat like a phantom around him and he knew that the dying man had seen him with the last light of his eyes. 

Of his past no man would speak or knew. He wore a pistol across his belly and he lacked the first joint of the longest finger of his right hand. Whether this lack was in his own memory or whether it was a sign from his birth of his own ill-formedness no man could say either. No one would remark on it save to say that that hand was the fastest to that revolver that they had ever seen and this was witness enough. He was tall and narrow faced as a hatchetblade and mustachioed like a soldier of a foreign war and another era or perhaps his own past as grizzled as his hair seemed to be beneath that flatcrowned hat.

He rode this day in the company of others who asked little and offered less but who shared the uniform of their master or at least their employer in the long brown coats they all wore. Save for the preacher. He rode in his dusty black coat but there was no quarrel in this. They had each and all been paid and each and all had been promised yet more. So long as this obligation was carried out well and dutifully. The story spoken in town around shop door and over glasses and spread by the man called Gomez was indeed true.

There were several of them and they rode all together with their horses' shoulders all but touching in each stride as they came down the hardpacked and dusty road that led into Clifton Mesa. The peace that had reigned in Clifton Mesa was now at an end for a time.

The horses at the rails stepped and shivered nervously at the passing of these other animals who tossed their heads anxiously and were held back by their silent riders. They walked through the town as they were in their line abreast and passed each structure in its turn.

There were men in the saloon who wore red rags and sashes and kerchiefs and they looked out from the edges of the windows to see the dark shapes of the horses move through the town in the early light. Ahead of these passing horsemen every door was barred and every window was shuttered as with the first sweeping dark and haunted light of an oncoming storm are houses set to shelter those within them and the wanderer on the hills can see the lights of fires and lamps going out in the creeping dark like bright eyes shut by sleep or death. These horsemen were too like the storm that ends fair weather but will bring some colder kind of fairness behind them. And so followed this strange weather in this desert town.

The newcomer stood among the men bearing their sigil of red rags as one of them alike and kept his place alongside a window of waving and imperfect glass whereupon the bright reflections of golden dust and blue sky and dark horsemen shone across him and hid him from sight. The view of the horsemen was warped as though seen through turbulent water and the limbs of man and animal were twisted in these ocular peculiarities into something resembling monsters or quiet beasts crawled up out of Hell or set loose therefrom. One of the men with whom he had been at cards was beside him and looked out the window. He was called McGill. He spat on the floor and then spoke.

\--Knew there was a damn good reason Bloodworth left last night. That man can smell em coming.

Elsewhere in the room some man grunted his disagreement with McGill's assessment

\--I swear it, he added then quietly.

Nothing more was said and each man kept to his post at window and at door. Some were seen and some were unseen but each man kept his watch and some touched nervously at their weapons but no man yet made a move.

After a while another four men rode into town abreast and wearing the sign of their employ on their shoulders and flying behind them in the wind that now pulled its way through town and lifted coat and dust alike. 

They joined with the others and they assembled on horseback at the end of the street where the town opened out into the desert and the hills beyond without wall or regard. Their hoses milled and wheeled uncertainly and shook their ears and snorted. The men upon them parleyed briefly and then walked down the road again in sets of two and three almost like dancers in a reel or like targets pulled in a game.

\--More of them. Could get ugly. So remarked one.

\--They want this, they got to take the first shot, McGill said then.

This rule was the first rule and they would all follow it from their respective sides. But the first shot was inevitable and they waited for it as one awaits the thunder that follows from the swift strike of faraway lightning. 

They watched these horsemen still through the marbled glass as they paraded about in the street. The man who had attended to them from behind the bar was well hidden now in whatever corner or rootcellar he had set up for himself in times such as these and so they, with no regard to him, would at intervals swing themselves over the zinc lid of the bar and take what they pleased from behind it. A man returned to a table bearing a bottle and stood his rifle beside him on the table like a shepherd's rod and drank. McGill took off his hat and looked inside it and then put it on again.

The newcomer among them struck a match on the coarse wood of the windowsill before him and sheltered the flame in his cupped hands as he lit his cigarillo and blew raw smoke around his face. He threw the spent match on the floor and left his post by the window. He was the first among them to do so. Those behind him saw him go and they stiffened and stilled as though in fear or as those betrayed by foolishness or design.

The door of the place hung open and he could see that the horsemen in the street beyond had turned at the farther edge of the town and were now returning back again. He stepped to the doorway and leaned on the loosehanging hinges of the swinging doors and he looked at the horsemen as they passed. He passed through the door and now stood under the sheltering eaves of the place and he leaned against a rawturned railing and post and he looked still at the riders as they passed. It was now that the riders looked at him and at the red cloth he wore. He said nothing but he looked at them and he smoked and he was unconcerned. The Preacher passed him by then and these two principals saw each other and saw in each other's eyes some sign of that same understanding that passes unspoken between matched wolves of strange packs when they pass in the high mountains or meet at a kill.

The horsemen had all but passed by. One of the last of them hailed him.

\--Hey, stranger. What are you doing out here?

\--Seemed too good a day not to see it. Thought I'd see it. And he smiled some in his way.

There was scattered laughter among the horsemen but it was unkind and sounded like the cracking of falling stones. Two or three of those who had been ahead and wheeled around and now began to gather with the first two with whom he spoke. The man on the porch took the cigarillo out of his mouth and studied it.

\--It seems you gentlemen thought the same. Going out for a ride like this. He turned his eyes back to them and still he smiled in his way.

\--You should ride with us, my friend. Do you have a horse for it?

He pointed to the rail that ran across the front of the establishment where there were horses tied and a trough of water stood before them. Some of the horses raised their heads up at their voices and looked them with their chins dripping. The horseman looked these animals over carefully and then drew his pistol.

The horse staggered at the shot when it pierced its head. It swayed a moment and then slid to the ground with its eyes white and rolling and the reins still bound up to the rail and it still in its halter. The horses around it split and stamped and snorted as it fell along side them and then gathered themselves along the rail again.

But before even the echoes of that first shot had rebounded and answered from the walls of the town and the hills beyond and perhaps even before the sound of the shot itself had rung in the ears of those witnesses present, the man on the porch of the saloon had his own pistol in his hand and the horseman fell from his saddle with his weapon still in his hand. His horse shied and stepped from his body and the dust settled on his open but unseeing eyes. The nine remaining horsemen fixed their eyes on the man on the porch of the saloon. He kept his gun in his hand.

\--Seems he shot another man's horse.

Eight of the horsemen now drew their weapons from their saddles and their hips and their pockets and whatever strange places to which these instruments had been lashed. The preacher did not but continued to watch. Behind the man under the eaves there was the sound of breaking glass and along his periphery he could see that a rifle had been set to through the shattered windowpane of the place behind him. There were more sounds of windows breaking there behind him and from the rooms above him. 

It was at these sounds that the horsemen threw themselves down from their horses and found cover for themselves on the opposing side of the street behind whatever board or barrel or door that they could take. The horses loped quietly aside. The man on the porch moved in opposition to these dismounted horsemen and made his way back through the loose-hanging doors of the saloon and back to his place alongside the window. McGill was yet there and he held a rifle through the shattered remains of the window. He looked at the man.

\--Ain't never seen anyone fast as that.

The man said nothing but with stayed out of sight and reloaded his weapon with great patience and great care. 

And so they waited then with each man on his chosen side of the street and all waited for what next cry or shot might follow. The first shot had been taken and the second followed soon after but as to the third there was now some notion of debate. And so each man waiting and listened to his breathing and to the rhythms of his dark and laborious heart dependent within him.

The third shot slanted through the farther window and the young man that had crouched there fell against the windowsill and stained it with his blood and there he died. The man at the other window looked with narrowed eyes across the street to see the smoke dissolving from around the preacher's gun and he knew who had fired the third shot. The preacher looked at him on the other side of the window but did not fire his pistol again.

There was silence in the town again for a moment. 

A rattling drove of bullets struck then against each opposing side of the street like hailstones thrown by winter storms against the walls and windows there. Shingles were shot loose and fell spinning into the street and the rails and posts shattered into raw splinters as they were battered by this artillery. A man fell on the side opposite the saloon and lurched into the street before he died where he was struck three more times before he fell. His death was answered by another within the saloon from one of the windows in the upper story which was announced to those below only by the heavy sound of his fall as he collapsed and struck against the floor. These opposing forces struck at each other for some time with each rising attack followed softly by a low ebb as too many were obliged to recharge their weapons before they could strike again. But they did strike again though each missed as often as he hit and soon each side was dwindling in strength.

They fought by turns then with those who could fire leaning from window casements and from around the detritus in the street while the others crouched hidden below or behind them while recharging their pieces. And when the first were spent then the second would stand. For a time there was blood flowing in small rivulets from those struck by splinters or by the passage of the lead balls but none fell. And they carried on this stalemate for some time until the alternating rhythms of their respective attacks dwindled as hard rain will slow to single droplets and seem to all but stop. So too then did a strange peace pass over the battered street for a moment while all gathered up what lead and powder they had left to prepare for the next breaking wave of this attack. So too did days pass between these two factions at times as each gathered up lead and powder and man for the next such battle as this and so the small was reflected upon the great and these pieces moved in their prescribed patterns upon this board.

Another shot was fired then into the windows behind which the remains of Bloodworth's men sheltered. The glass above McGill's head shattered and rained down in bright pieces like broken spring ice into the dipped crown of his hat. He ducked under the falling shards and looked out the window again and swore. The pistol smoke dissolved in the air as it rose from the hiding places of their adversaries across the street. The newcomer, the man who stood again on the other side of the window from McGill, now peered over his shoulder and through the broken glass. The sharp face and flatcrowned hat of the man called preacher glimmered at the edge of his vision and in the undulating patterns of the shattered windowpanes. Whether that man without could see him within he could not discern. But at that moment one of Bloodworth's number staggered forward with his left arm hanging uselessly and the sleeve of his shirt now another red flag for his loyalty. 

He moved at a drunkard's pace and with a drunkard's certainty as he leaned and tottered across the stained floor and towards those swinging doors. No man reached to stop him. He pushed through the doors and stumbled on feet that moved more as though they were made of logs and stumps than flesh and bone. His right hand swing up and he still bore his pistol in it. He pointed it towards those hidden enemies with an unsteady hand but with the reckless certainty of one mad or close enough to death to be mad. One man among those hidden in the rubbish of the street leaned nearer so as to better aim his own weapon and in that moment the dying man fired and felled the man who had pressed forward. The hidden collapsed like a marionette with its strings cut. And the bleeding man fell backwards and onto the porch again and shattered his skull against the boards as he fell. 

In the moment that he fell and lay against that worn and raw wooden step with his head broken and his life gone but still the blood of it spilling over the step and falling into the dust to darken it there like dark and strange rain there came over the street a silence which was almost a sound unto itself with all the immensity of a storm on the plains about to break or the sudden and monumental silence of mountains in the distance of the high desert. All those on either side of this divided and polarized and bloody street still with life and sense in them heard this silence and knew its meaning. They knelt in this silence behind barrels and crates and among refuse in the street and behind broken windows and with weapons now but half-charged now all waited for the sound that would first break this silence and all knew this silence would shatter and fall at a consensus amongst themselves but against their wills at a moment when man's heart and man's blood and man's own raw nerves would pulse in unison and so too spark the fire of the next volley.

They waited. The horses were still. They did not wait long.

In the way of silence so was the way of sound.

The next rounds fell alike on either side and in parallel and in matched strikes like colliding waves met in a storm or stones hurled by beasts or demons at these coarse structures now hollowed out by cartridges and splintered wounds. The sound came and once over and through all and drawn down through those same never so recently stretched taut with waiting. The horses screamed and pulled at the rail with their eyes white and rolling and wild.

From behind what poor shelter the broken windowframe provided him, McGill was struck along the shoulder and the red mark of it slide down his sleeve in matching length to the red kerchief knotted around his neck and still token of the purpose for this blood to be spilled.

A man stepped out from behind the heaped rubbish in the street and shot with pistol in each hand and seemed half-mad so calmly did he step into that plain between the two factions. A bullet between his eyes felled him and all those of Bloodworth's men and all those of Santa Fe Jack's men looked to see from whose weapon the smoke yet trailed. McGill twisted his neck to see the newcomer standing above him and to see that it was he who could claim that death. The stranger drew back the hammer of his pistol again and looked yet across the street.

The Preacher let his face be seen enough under his black hat and behind the protective wood and rubbish he had assumed. He looked back across the road and his eyes met those of the newcomer and then moved on. The Preacher looked aside and drew back the hammer of his own weapon and raised it.

McGill fell then with his wounded arm flying loose and red and then redder still as what blood was left in him flooded from the hole struck true by the bullet from the gun of the man called Preacher. McGill fell back onto the floor and his blood pooled under him and his red scarf turned redder still and then darkened as his skin paled and his eyes stared unseeing at the unpainted ceiling.

The silence fell again like a thunderbolt. But here there was no rest and no waiting. For now this caesura was no more than the illusory rest of waves on a shore who know no rest. But the silence fell.

Boldly as the bold man who shot with both his pistols and was felled by the newcomer's gun then stood the men in their long coats and the Preacher was among them. 

A man of Bloodworth's following and young had stood behind his own shattered window there before the street and had seen McGill fall. He stepped first from behind what protected such broken windows and shattered wood did afford him and into the fame of the door and then down into the street. He carried his pistol on his hip and his rifle in both hands. It was he who next broke that fragile silence that was no more than a breath between the volleys.

Another man on the opposing side of the street was flung back by a shot like any discarded rag and he fell against the wall behind him and left mark of his life and death there before he fell to the ground. 

And so the blood was spilled in response and in reply and for each one fallen another stood up and another fell and another stood up again to avenge the one fallen and so the blood was spilled in equal parts in that street. And at last all those who hide behind broken windowframes and smashed crates came forward and faced one another and shot wildly and without regard for who or what they struck but as though to let fly some terrible urge within them not to kill with purpose but to destroy wantonly. And they destroyed much. But of those who came into the street and into view of his enemies there were two who waited and who preferred the shadows: the newcomer among Bloodworth's men and the Preacher alone held their small pieces of ground. Each man saw the other and each man looked at the other and each man struck in favor of his side when one of his compatriots was at peril. 

The thundering sounds of such a battle in such a long war disturbed much: horses yet screamed and the birds and chickens of the town were hidden and huddled under house and store and dogs who had barked at the first strikes now to cowered in doorways and were silent and there were none save those who were to fight and to die to be seen in any window or doorway. And yet into the mingled dust and smoke and scent of blood there came a man known only vaguely to some if they could have recalled then the day before.

He had been drunk then too, the man called "El Gato." He had been drunk more recently now and it showed in the filth on his clothes and the blood in his eyes. He smelled of a stable where he'd slept through the worst of it but the shooting in the street had brought him out and he carried his weapon like any of the others.

None noticed him. None cared to notice him. He was a drunkard and a lout and that he carried a weapon at all was at first ludicrous. He was not regarded because he was not worth regarding. 

But then one of the men in their long duncolored coats took shelter again to recharge his weapon and turned into the sun where El Gato's shadow stretched in black demarcation towards him. And in such shadow and to his eye the man in hiding thought he knew the man who stood there at a distance before him. And he shouted to him in warning:

\--Ramirez. The hell are you doin' here? Jack sent you up to the house with the rest of 'em. Ye want his money or don't ye? Get the hell back there.

Rising through clouds of blue smoke the Preacher raised his head and looked at the squinting and staggering stranger with sharp and glittering eyes. He called to his compatriot in reply:

\--That ain't Ramirez. 

\--The hell it ain't, the man answered.

\--It ain't Ramirez, the Preacher said again.

This was enough for El Gato. He had heard of what he had hoped for at the first when he had come stinking of liquor and boldness to beg a place among Bloodworth's men for just this same money. And now in his mind's eye he saw it lying in wait for him in that distant manor of a farmhouse out by that desert spring. Understanding bloomed across his face and he turned and ran again to fetch his horse. 

The man who had called him by the wrong name saw in his gait that he had been wrong and leveled his pistol at the fleeing figure and fired but struck nothing but the stones that lay scattered in the road. El Gato ducked all the same but kept running. 

The Preacher then raised his weapon and with calm in that hot and smokefilled air he leveled it to El Gato's rolling shoulders and loosely flying arms. He held his aim. But it was in this moment that amidst the shouts and screams and the incessant gunfire and the hail of bullets exchanged on both sides that the Preacher heard the hammer of a pistol pulled back and locked and he knew that the barrel of that gun was upon him. 

He turned and he saw on the opposing side of the street a man in a long coat but with a red rag wrapped around his throat and thrown over his shoulder. The wind lifted this rag for a moment and stirred the hem of his coat but the man did not move. He held his aim on the Preacher and the Preacher held his aim on El Gato but their eyes were fixed on one another.

It was in that moment that they two found themselves alone in the eye of the storm around them. There was stillness in this moment and there was silence for their ears alone. They held themselves there unmoving, unblinking, and held back alike the pandemonium rising around them. They held themselves there, each man alike holding himself and the other in such intricate geometries as when the balance of each piece depends upon the balance of each other piece and so preserves the balance of the whole. In this balance structure then each waited for the other and neither would move. Neither could move. And it was here that they waited. 

And it was between them then that a horse came thundering and snorting. Like a madman or like a beast in flight. El Gato rode his horse through the clotted and massed battle of men on either side of the street. They scattered at his coming as though they feared him and they parted before him as he galloped between them and disappeared again down the road from which all had once come and down which those who lived had hoped to go. 

The Preacher yet held his gun aimed where El Gato had been running. He did not move. He faced the stranger newly hired into Bloodworth's allegiance and the stranger faced him. The cloud of dust raised by El Gato's ragged horse now fell upon all those he had left behind in soft reminder. The wind blew again. The scattered enemies regrouped themselves and prepared to launch anew their attacks on one another. But for the moment there was stillness. 

Into this stillness cracked one gunshot. 

The Preacher's gun was snatched from his hand by that shot and tossed aside into the dust beyond his reach. He looked at it, he looked at his hand, he looked at the man who had fired.

The man who had fired, the newcomer, the stranger turned away from the battle here held in its interlude and collected his horse from the rail and like the other stranger before him then rode it between the two embattled sides of that bloodied street and out again into the desert beyond in pursuit of one man and of one place and of one notion.


	4. Chapter 4

When El Gato reached the house it was silent. Like the houses he knew far better in the depths of night and in the silence of the sleep of their keepers. A scavenging dog trotted through the blowing dust on bony ankles and looked at him where he sat his horse but did nothing and turned its head again and trotted away again. It was too soon yet for the dogs and the desert wolves to come and seek their inevitable part of these new happenings but the dust was beginning to blow into the house through open doors and open windows in soft traces and long drifts that rolled and twisted into shapes like the shapes of the desert hills and desert valleys in miniature and the sand came into the house. And he arrived like some herald of some unspeakable calamity that had come too late with news too old. And he did not care. He left his horse standing at the doorway and he went in.

The windows of the house were broken and there was blood on the threshold. The house was cool when he went into it and it was dark and he could not at first see what he had come there to see for the brightness outside. The light of the desert hills beyond the house poured through the shattered windows and splintered doors like soft and liquid gold as though it could fill up this hollow house and purge it of the shadows it gathered unto itself there. He stood in the doorway as a shadow himself until he could see in the darkness again.

They were scattered about before him in the broken and dark rooms of the house dead in their blood. He looked about at this desolate scene. Many lay about the overturned table where the remains of the midday meal and all its earthenware crockery now lay broken with it and among them and some were mutilated and some were without heads. Bloodworth's men and Santa Fe Jack's men alike lay where their blood pooled on the floor and shared itself among itself as it would never have been shared in life. These men were fallen with their chests and limbs punctuated with bulletholes as though they had been soaked each and all in some kind of hellish rain and some had their heads carved into hollow shapes by other weapons and other bullets and the brainmatter spilt across the floor and soaking in that same blood and some were without scalps and some were without heads at all. Some of the old servants had crawled while dying into far corners for shelter and some had raised their hands before them in attitudes of surrender or of prayer and they held these postures even in death. One clutched a rosary. The cross was of gold and he took it.

He made his way among the corpses and turned them over as it suited him like any vulture or raven that makes its way among the dead and left bloody footprints behind him as a sign of his witness. The eyes of the dead were already growing cloudy where there were eyes yet left in these heads and they stared unseeing at the ceilings of the house as though they could see the firmament from which these ceilings and these roofs hid them as it arched away as silent and blind as any of these dead eyes over the living and over the dead.

A boy lay half crushed and dead under the fallen body of a woman in a tiny antechamber at the rear of the house and he knew this to be Bloodworth's wife and son. The door through which they had meant to flee had been riddled through with irregular holes like knotholes of a strange and multifoliate tree but it was by this that they had fallen as even a fool in this time and this place knew what such holes meant and how they died before that door. The woman's blouse had been white and now it was red. She wore jewelry on her wrists and her ears and her fingers and he took these even as her dark hair fell from its coils and around his wrists. Her arms were yet wrapped around the boy and she would not release her grasp now that her body was growing rigid in death. Of Bloodworth the man he saw no sign but he did not care and he did not search for there would be none that could survive these events for long.

There was a voice among the carnage when El Gato passed a particular fallen shape. One man who was not yet dead but was dying lay near his feet and with bloodied fingers reached for El Gato's leg and mouthed words but made no sound of sense. El Gato put his pistol to the man's chest and said nothing but emptied out of the dying man what little life and what little blood was left in him. When the man lay dead, he crossed himself for no reason but old habit and idle hands and some ancient superstition that lay quiet and dormant in him and all men about the infectious filth of death and then he left this man too to lie in his blood. 

He searched the house. He made his way through cabinets and cupboards and stained with his rough hands the lace of Bloodworth's wife's trousseau as he searched. Anything that pleased him of her jewelry he took as well. 

He made his way upstairs by climbing over those fallen on the stairs themselves and by stepping upon their bodies in his passage. He found the room in which Bloodworth had carried out his business of life and death and coin and El Gato threw his bills of sale and terms of protection and correspondence into the air so that they fell around him like strange snow and across the floor like a skein of dead white birds shot down out of the sky and bled to death. There was nothing to be found here that pleased him. There were only demands for money and promises of money but neither was made true. Bloodworth's body was not here either. He descended the stair again.

He returned to the room where the bread of a meal and the blood of those who would have eaten it mingled together and called in the animals and the creatures to devour both in strange offering back unto the earth. There was a chest of drawers in the corner. It was plain and worn and the top was draped with a piece of white lace like a bride or an altar. He lifted the lace first and then he threw it aside. The first drawer opened stiffly against its runners and it held a bible. He closed the drawer. The second drawer would not open nor would the third or the fourth. He jammed his fingers in the space where the drawer should have opened and found that they were false drawers. He overturned the chest of drawers and in so doing revealed in splitered wood at the back of it a false back and a hidden strongbox for which he had been searching.

It lay unscathed and locked yet and he broke further the wooden panel at the back of the chest of drawers and lifted the cache out of its hiding place as best he could and pulled it then across the floor nearer to the door of the house. He left marks in the sand and blood on the floor and deep scratches like wounds themselves in the floor. He settled himself then on the floor in the better light that streamed still in from the desert and burned in reflection from its stones and sand. He examined the lock and he considered it as he knew he must.

A shadow stepped into the doorway and that same shadow fell across him as he crouched on the floor. He turned like some small vermin upon its discovery in those brief moments before it flees into the dark again. He did not flee but he stared. A man stood in the doorway. He wore a long coat that was spattered alike with mud and blood and dust but it was pale where other such coats were dark and leathern and he wore around his neck the same long red rag that demarcated him among all men and among his fellows as one of Bloodworth's men. He stood in the doorway and he watched the man called El Gato where he squatted like a ray on the floor. 

El Gato drew his pistol out of the front of his pants and drew back the hammer so that the sound of its drawing back could be heard in any room of that dead house. The man in the doorway lifted his long coat up and away from the butt of his own pistol but said nothing and did nothing more. 

And so they stood while the wind grew stronger and blew the desert into the house and the softly drifting dust collected in the spilled blood and thickened it into a mud of its own and a strange reminder of mankind as his past whether base or divine where it lay within the mud.

\--Well, Amigo. What do you want?

The man in the doorway removed the cigarillo he held clamped between his teeth and spat the bitten paper end dryly onto the floor.

\--The same thing you want.

El gato laughed where he crouched on the floor.

\--But you see, Amigo. I have the chest. And what do you have?

The man in the doorway drew his gun. He drew it and leveled it at El Gato and he too drew back the hammer of his gun and he waited. 

\--Now. Are you gonna open that chest?

El Gato stared at the man and there was no fear in his eyes. 

\--These things take time, Amigo.

\--You ain't go much. The rest of Bloodworth's gang is on the way.

\--And you, Amigo?

The man looked down at the red scapular of rags hanging around his throat like the long stain of blood that trails from the neck of a slaughtered animal and he smiled. His pistol stayed on El Gato. 

\--No, I already told you. I'm here for the same thing you are.

\--You mean. And he gestured vaguely towards the locked chest with his idle left hand.

\--Yeah.

The man stepped farther across the threshold and surveyed the room quietly once before returning to the thief at his feet.

\--Amigo. And El Gato smiled. We both came here for the same reason--for the money. But if you kill me, you will never open this chest and you will never have even one cent of that money. And he laughed in his throat. But, Amigo. If you let El Gato open this chest for you, I will only take my share of the money. For the services I provide.

\--How much? The man stood still.

\--Half. We will be partners.

The man shook his head and began to smile very faintly.

\--I could get you to open the chest and then I could kill you. You'd better make this worth your while.

\--You wouldn't lie to me, Amigo.

The man only smiled. You get that chest open and we see how much is in it. Then you get your share.

The contents of this strongbox lay yet hidden and whatever treasure it might be and the imagined sound of hooves on sand and baked clay all together urged the thief on. This was El Gato's joy and it was his vocation.

He drew out his tools in their packet of leather where they had lain hidden against his chest and unrolled the worn hide so that the silver probes and tines lay splayed in their sewn sheaths like the strange bones of some alien or forgotten animal.

The man, the new amigo, stood over him and watched him quietly, his pistol still out and still ready but yet unaimed for the moment.

This was El Gato's vocation and he knew it, choosing tine or pincer or spike or false key as the work demanded and as he saw fit in his conversation with and violation of the lock. 

The sun had dropped lower and the light was golden on the men and the chest and the small silver tools and the bodies of the dead around them.

The was a snap like the gear of a clock turning over or like a thread snapping and the lock was open.

\--This lock that she was being clever but there are no locks that are more clever than El Gato.

He reached for the lip of the lid to open it but the man over him moved and he checked himself with a look over his shoulder at this amigo.

\--Open it.

And El Gato did, swinging back the heavy lid that had weighed down over those hidden contents as well as any lock. A sheet of foolscap paper lay between him and whatever fortune he sought and he lifted this out of the chest and threw it onto the floorboards amid the dust and rivulets of blood. The man watched it where it drifted and then lay still as one corner of the paper drew up into itself very slowly the droplets of blood over which it had fallen. He picked it up and he read it. El Gato plunged his hands into the paper bills and cold coins greedily and gleefully like a wolf at the feast of a kill and all the while running the coins through his hands like a man testing water or grain. He turned over his shoulder again to where the man stood with the paper.

\--It's all ours. Yours and mine. Shares.

\--No it ain't.

\--Whadyou mean?

He held up the paper between two fingers and let it hang in front of El Gato's nose. 

\--I mean it ain't ours.

El Gato grabbed for the danging paper as though it had been stolen from him.

\--I can't read this.

The man adjusted again the stubby cigarillo in his mouth and spoke around it.

\--I can. And it says we got to take that money to Bloodworth's brother. In Santa Ana.

\--Santa? Santa Ana?

\--Yeah. Santa Ana. And he smiled. Or else you won't keep even one cent of that money.

\--You lying bastard. You show me where it says that. And he held out the paper in his demand.

\--Right here. He he took back the long sheet of coarse paper and he pointed one stained and calloused finger at two words which were Santa Ana.

El Gato could read that much though his lips moved silently as he found the sounds to match the curves and lines of each letter as though he were making the sounds new in the world and for the first time.

\--To hell with this brother. We have the money, Amigo. Who's going to stop us?

The man spat dryly again onto the floor. Flies were beginning to congregate on the coagulating pools of blood and to feed on the new corpses. Hr touched the red rags around his neck and shoulders again as a reminder to them both.

\--I don't think Bloodworth's gang would be too pleased with us if we did that. Santa Fe Jack's going to be angry enough as it is.

\--Then let them have it. El Gato is no man's errandboy.

The man hummed a little in disagreement.

\--No. We take that money to his brother and we get shared. Thirds. That's what the paper says.

El Gato's mouth opened and then closed and then opened again.

\--Shares?

\--Equal thirds, the man said. A share for that brother and even shares for whoever delivers it. Thirds is what I was going to give you, anyway. And he smiled again.


	5. Chapter 5

When the man called the Preacher arrived at the house, he was too late.

He was too late twice over and now the flies began to congregate on the clotting blood and on the open mouths of the dead in preparation for their feast. He was too late for the bloodshed which might have been pleasurable and he was too late for the money which would have been his reward. He had nothing now but an empty door in which he now stood and made the wind find its way around him to deposit its loads of red and yellow dust.

There were marks on the floor. There were footprints made in blood and signs of things brought or pulled or dragged. There were rags hacked to pieces. There were unseen things which he knew were missing. And there were things he could now see were missing. The chest he would have otherwise sought out now stood open and violated in the middle of the floor of this antechamber of a house of slaughter and it was as hollow as the doorway and empty as an eyesocket as it gaped at the ceiling. Like a throat without voice it was mute but he knew its meaning as one wronged knows the wrongdoing.

Among the tracks of horses in the dust outside there were two new sets of tracks now only beginning to fill with dust.

Behind him and now drawing near he knew were the last ragged remnants in their ragged coats pulling themselves as survivors free from the twin slaughter in the streets of Clifton Mesa. Such was the end of a war. They too would come into that empty doorway. Such had been their orders.

He walked through the house and kicked aside the loosely fallen limbs of the dead when they strayed unbidden into his path. He did not yet track by the marked tracks in dust and blood alike. He knew yet where they pointed and where they led.

The coin and all of it was gone but it was not lost. Two fresh tracks by two familiar horses would not so soon be wiped from the face of the desert beyond. And there would yet be the scraps of the followers of Santa Fe Jack to welcome and then to set to hound down the money for which they had fought and bled and killed. They would not yet have it nor should they ever in their lives for dogs do not destroy or consume the quarry they are bidden to retrieve. Not if they are obedient and brought to heel. Not when they expect to be better fed later. He would have time. He would greet them in the house as though it were his own. It suited him.

He ascended the stairs and came into a room and found alone within the room the stiffening and lifeless bodies of two men of whom he knew well and much. He took a pipe then from his pocket and rubbed the bowl of it and looked down upon the earthly remains of Richard Bloodworth and "Santa Fe" Jack Harrington. 

The spent and smoldering match he threw to their corpses.

\--You sons of bitches, he said and he smiled.


	6. Chapter 6

They had departed that charnel house in the golden afternoon light with their shadows pulling at length across the dust and drawing out the shadows of the legs of their horses to spindled shapes like the thinnest black wires to be drawn through a mold. They carried the money then between them in divided shares but with neither bearing so much as would make it worth his while to steal either what he carried or what the other carried. El Gato rode first before his companion and then behind and was satisfied with neither for each time he regarded the one who rode alongside him the other was looking at him. And so he would adjust his horse's steps. And this frustrated him because it spoke to him of a weakness in his certainty in that he would not remove himself from this other but he resolved that he would not show this. They rode side by side for a while and the articulated legs of their horses aligned and alternated in their long shadows. 

They would from here be obliged to ride in the deserts and in the wastes for three days if they rode quickly and well. They could not be certain of their speed. El Gato's new amigo had mapped in his mind and by directions of mountains and hills and roads the passages between towns and towards Santa Ana. The stories of Clifton Mesa and the men who would each hold it had spread far enough that they knew then upon their departure that their journey would require their passage through lands held by unfriendly adversaries who would not permit such an enemy together with such a stranger and such a treasure to pass so quietly and easily through their lands. They would have to ride quickly and well if they were to ride at all. 

In the lowering sun they rode out beyond the house and its tended lands and through twisted trees and cholla, an elfin forest of thorned things, through a gap between two swelling hills and down again among the loose stones and creosote brush and rougher sand. They crossed a broad plain of desert grass dotted with the skeletons of trees that keep themselves at the sharpest edge between life and death in a shape that herded them towards the higher stone hills. As though to fence them in there stood around them stone walls free from the earth of the hills around them that followed the ridgelines down to where they lay broached and tumbled upon the plain. The cotton eye of the moon hung in daylight in the stone hollows of the corrugated mountains beyond and the moon began to climb higher in opposition to the sun there at the terminals of the world. They rode on full of the knowledge that they did not travel unattended and that they must keep moving so long as they could keep moving or else perish in the attempt. They rode up again into the higher hills and the man turned to consider the sun squatting on the western rim of the world in the blooming colors of the red clouds.

They set their fire that night in a hollow circled by stones in the hopes of hiding its light from whatever pursuers might already be behind them. The fire was low and did little to warm them but it was the shape of the fire they longed for and what little comfort they could draw from it. In the darkness then El Gato climbed to the top of one of the ring of stones and sought shapes in the dark. There was a bright spark in the darkness beyond like a misplaced star. He dropped down to his own fire again and searched in his saddlebags. From them he produced a brass cavalry spyglass taken from the body of some dead soldier or other from whatever heap of corpses he had be left within for scavengers of all shapes whether they be human or that of another kind of beast. He opened it and climbed again to the top of the stone and looked through his spy glass in the dark at the brightness in the distant dark. Figures moved against the light of the fire like some creatures loosed out of hell but kept idle and so these dark shapes moved in contrast and stripe against the brightness of their watchfires. He spoke without taking his gaze from the distant fire.

\--They are following us, Amigo.

The amigo said nothing but sat before the fire working with stolen needle and thread in scraps of linen hacked and likewise stolen from the massacre behind them. He said nothing but drove the thread through the weave of the cloth and hauled it taut. El Gato crawled back down from his sentry post and watched the fire glint off the point of the needle and the man's hands as they pushed needle and thread alike through the rough shapes of the cloth. He shut the spyglass with the heel of his hand.

\--Like a woman, Amigo.

The man said nothing but kept his head lowered before the fire and over his work and the uneven light of the fire lay across the brim of his hand and his hands as he worked. After a time, he called to El Gato and showed him the things he had made. El Gato had gone to the far side of the fire and had lain there at length on the dist with a spine of cactus between his teeth and a pebble in his mouth against thirst and against boredom. He came around to the other side of the fire and threw his shadow down on the man. The man held before him a pouch and a satchel like the rudiments of a pilgrim's costume to be carried for whatever offerings or rewards he might collect. 

\--You wear this around your neck and that one down your front. Under that pistol of yours. We'll hide the money in them and they won't find it. They won't want to look for it there.

El Gato looked at him with a face that made clear the offense done to him but he also laughed quietly and showed his bright teeth and tossed his chin at the other.

\--No, no, you should wear it, Amigo. It is your idea.

The man looked around his companion and into the movement of the fire. He had one knee bent beside him and he rested his forearm against it and let his hand hang before him idly.

\--No, I don't think I should. After all, they know me already. They don't know you.

\--They're too small. The money--

\--It'll hold enough.

\--And if I should perhaps ride off with all this money under my clothes?

The man looked at him.

\--You won't.

They ate small handfuls of the bread and meat they had carried with them from the house of the slaughter and drank water that moved among the rocks in small rivulets and shared this with the horses. They let the fire burn when the shape of the night came down around them and then El Gato named between them the cities of the plains, the cities of the deserts, the cities of the mountains, and the cities of the hills--the places known to all or some or one of them, the places named for men and saints (Washington, St. Louis, San Miguel), the places with tripping syllables for names that meant nothing to their ears but that they were a place and this was its name (Telluride, Lago, Tucumcari), the places whose names were what they were (Desperation, Defiance, Nowhere).

There were places that lived and died, there were places that would grow and would yet prosper someday, there were earth and mud cities that had been dragged out of the dirt and would abandoned slide back into the dirt again, there were names that changed around a place though the place was yet the place, but yet there was the land and the truth of the places themselves. Even that which was no more had yet been. Even if they were far behind, resting at the mouths of canyons and down in the best part of the worst lands and rising up in mud mounds out of sand and rock, and one's own having been within them transient as a day or a passing shadow was nothing more than the ghostly cast-off shell of a summer cicada latched to a tree: a hollow pressure on the air and a small shadow stretching off into the distance of something that once was there and wasn't anymore. Wait until the wind takes it away again.

Better that small shadow than the shadow of a grave. Better desert heat than cold grave-dirt. Even buzzards rose up on the sun before they came down to the dirt again.

But it was decided thus: names cease to matter. The thing is real and this is known or it is known by someone and therefore it is. Embers at the ends of matches, at the end of a bitten-off and stubby cigarillo, at the bottom of a fire: these are all the same. Names cease then to truly matter. Their purpose has been erased for now all know the intention and the meaning and there is no further call to mark it by some specificity of sound. As any fire is all fire so it is known. But a will to deceive is in all things luminous and may manifest itself likewise in retrospect and so by sleight of some fixed part of a journey already accomplished may also post men to alien destinations. They turned down in their blankets and slept there before their fire.


	7. Chapter 7

They rose at dawn and saddled the horses and looked in the distance behind them to see the smoke of the fire they had seen in the night rising in a narrow column into the bright air. El Gato adjusted the new pouches he carried on his person stuffed as they were with their secret couriered message and coin. He looked dissatisfied but resigned and took the hobble off his horse and climbed into the saddle. They left behind the blackened bones of their fire and its column of smoke in answer to the remains and smoke they knew were in the plain and valley behind them. Each knew now the presence of the other and to disguise such otherwise was vanity. They rode down the other side of the hill.

The mountains were blue in the distance and the shadows of their folds fell into the deep valleys they sheltered. Desert birds sang briefly in the hollows among the rocks in the cool of the morning. They descended from the hillside to another thornforest where nothing moved on the ground save the small lizards that crouched on the rocks and watched them as they passed. The shadow of an eagle passed over them and they looked up towards it where it rose like charred ash in the heat of some unseen fire into the depths of that limitless sky. They did not speak nor did they need to speak in this mission of delivery but they kept their horses moving as fast as they dared in the heat of the day and the horses wheezed but walked on.

They had ridden so in silence for the best part of the cool of the morning when there came from behind them the whistle of a bullet and the snapping of the limbs of the scrub trees like brittle bone. The sound of the shot followed after and echoed from the hillsides and the stones. 

They jumped down from the horses at once and dragged the animals behind them some paces deeper into the dense patches of dwarfed and twisted trees on the hillside. Another bullet followed the first and rattled down among the branches. In the distance they could see the smoke trailing in blue streams from the rifle that had been fired. 

The other riders were eight and riding abreast and they were still some distance. They wore long coats that flapped behind them like strange vestments of some bloody and forgotten order. The hill on which El Gato and his amigo crouched was low. They had yet shelter but it was poor as any rubbish in the streets of Clifton Mesa had been. They tied up the horses and kept to their shelter. El Gato watched their approach and drew out slowly the elaborate pistol he kept tucked in his belt. He held it by his ear and grinned as though already in victory. His companion, still bearing around his neck the red flag of his former and temporary alliance, leveled his pistol at the riders where their silhouetted forms shimmered in the sun. He fired and one man fell from his saddle as though caught by a rope and pulled from it. 

Two of the oncoming riders wheeled their horses around and turned back to the fallen man. They caught up the loose horse and for a moment rode in circles around the bleeding form in the dirt and the settling clouds of dust. The other five continued. They drew nearer and from the hillside it could be seen that one wore a black and flatcrowned hat. 

The man hiding in the brush on the hillside refilled the emptied chamber. El Gato looked at him and after a moment put away his decorated pistol again.

\--We can outrun them, Amigo, he said.

\--Maybe.

The man turned and looked up the low dome of the hill and considered it and the distant riders and then crept forward through the brush and collected his horse. It sidled and stepped when he caught it up. El Gato followed behind. Still bounded on all sides by the coarse and thorned brush they yet pushed forward to the crest of the hill. 

They were seen too easily seen from the slopes of the hill and the level ground in the valley to even pretend at stealth. But they sought cover in the hopes that any who aimed might miss. The riders below did fire and the sound of the shot came a heartbeat after the shot itself broke and ricocheted through the bracken.

They reached the smooth sloping and domed top of the hill and there sat their horses. El Gato cast around him and then looked to the other rider beside him. Who gave no sign. The wind at the top of the hill lifted the red rags hacked from what cloth in that poor borrowed room and a shot passed through them that near to man and horse and left a new hole in those rags. El Gato crouched on his horse and his horse squatted on its haunches and made ready to bolt. Still the other man did not move.

Still mounted, the man, the amigo, leveled his pistol again and another man dropped from his saddle and dashed himself against a rock as he fell. One of the other riders paused to look as though curious about the happening as one might be about any rare sight but stepped again to the side and came again. 

The man lowered his weapon and filled it again as before. He spoke over it as he did and watched alternately his hands and the dark shapes pursuing them.

\--That leaves six, he said. Perfect number. But I don't feel like spending any more on them. Come on.

Together and fast they turned to the far side of the hill and descended again amongst the same rough shrubs but thinner now and now among them larger stones and fallen boulders and in these stony places they sought and found better cover. The horses stepped faster in the open country now and they raced down again into the valley beyond and all the while knowing that they were yet pursued and that their trail of dust thrown up white in the daylight from the speed of the horses was as good as any sign or flag for those pursuing them. Still they pressed on and set the horses to running even in the heat of the day.

They sought distance and they found it though whether it was by their wills or the wills of their pursuers they could not be sure. Nor would they question it. The looked behind them from the tops of hills and from behind stones and from the hollowed ledges to be found on the precarious and crumbling trails along canyons and cliffs and saw their pursuers falling farther behind. 

At last the only sign of them was a trail of pale dust so like their own. And soon even this was hidden by another hill and another ridge in the desert dust rising so like the back of a whale out of some unknown sea. They rode on and there were miles behind them and between them and before them. They rode on. 

Some time past noon they came to a crossroads. What else to call it. A faint pathway came from the left and crossed their line then and went on to the right.

The land was flat here. No green things grew here. No lizards haunted the stones. Even the stones themselves were low in the tawny dust as though they too were oppressed by the immensity of the place itself. The land was stripped of all things save the most needed: sand and sky and a horizon between. The air shimmered in the rawness and purity of the place. And yet in the midst of the place there dragged a faint scar that was the crossroads. 

A scattering of tracks there from wagonwheel and mule marked the path. They joined then in the path and followed and lent their steps also to the path. 

In time, the road they followed crossed other roads and their tracks were joined by others. Hills rose up beside the road and sheltered them as the sun fell lower and burned more golden. Their tracks were fresh among other fresh tracks and the followed this road through these stony hills and up again to a rise from whence they could see in the falling and still more burnished light the low mud walls and flatfaced mission of an unknown town below them.

They rode down out of the dust and creosote bushes of the rise beyond the town and down into the shallow valley that held the town like some fragile thing worthy only of a modicum of protection. The land rose in low swells like some sullen sea around the place and around this sinking island of a town. They took to the road lined with tall yucca plants that slid through the middle of the town and kept to it.

They could already smell the fires of the place as they descended to it though the town was half in ruins and had not been much before it was ruined by the raiding of what collection of men these two riders could perhaps guess. The mud and white adobe walls stacked and tumbled one against the other like the fallen stones of some divine and ruined tower now left to wear in the desert weather. They rode down to the narrow street that bisected the town left and right and their coming was cried before them though silently. The way stood lined first with those who would see their coming and then by the dark wood of doors and shutters sealing up these earthen houses against the falling sunlight and the heat and the strangers of the day. The villagers' faces turned moonlike and waning into the shadow of their shelters and did not show again. Only a handful of men and boys marked their way and these watched their approach with tired but discerning eyes. A beggar rose in their path before them but he was snatched away by those who watched and was put too into one of the houses for safekeeping.

A well and a trough for animals rose in the plaza at the center of this poor town. Only a widening of this same pale street in this pale town. The horses trembled for want of water. The riders knew they would have to stop in this town for the sake of their mounts if for nothing else. They were yet pursued but they could not run without these animals nor could their pursuers and with fortune on their side all would rest this night and the chase might resume at the dawn.

At a trough in the town's dusty square and with others of their kind they tied the two ragged horses and left them to drink jaw to jaw with the other desert mules and wearied beasts of that land. Then the riders too went in search of drink for their own kind.

The paused without the mudshaped cantina on the square and drew out what coin they had that was not merely carried but was earned honestly or dishonestly by themselves. They had enough. El Gato pushed aside the dried cowhide that hung for a door and they entered a place of formless darkness. The earthen walls permitted no light nor were they cut for windows. The only light came from a hole in the ceiling through which smoke ought to pass but now the last reflected and golden light shone slanting down the flue and but vaguely into the room. Smoking and oily lights hung in what corners seemed to be thought best to bear them but they cast little light and only smoked. They approached a claytiled bar and stood before it. A broad man with a round face like a child but bearing the marks of a man's harsh life in the lines of that face appeared before them and laid his hands on those clay tiles.

\--How far is it to Santa Ana? El Gato's amigo asked.

\--A day's ride east, senor, the barman answered.

Nothing more was said. With that coin that was truly their own they laid the cost of two glasses before the barman. The barman did not move. He looked at the tattered scarf now pricked with the spines of cactus and shot through by a bullet come too close but he said nothing.

The barman looked at the man before him and then down to the tumbled cloth that fell across the man's hand where it lay on the top of the bar. The man understood. He reached and pulled the scarf from his neck in a sinuous motion and let it uncoil from its place serpentlike. He folded it on itself twice and put it in the pocket of his dustspattered jeans. He said nothing more. The raw ends trailed from beneath his long coat. The drinks were served them and they took them and turned their backs to the barman and drank with their elbows on the boards of the bar behind them and watched the room before them.

\--This is Santa Fe Jack's territory, El Gato said at last.

The man beside him said nothing. He drank and set down his glass and paid again and drank again. Such specie as he carried was acceptable so long as he was a stranger and swore no contrary allegiance that would endanger those who passed across the bar the harsh whiskey. They both paid and drank again. After a while, the man with the red rags in his pocket spoke.

\--We're not going to be welcome here too long.

With yet still what little was left of their own monies they paid for a meager meal served them by a barefoot youth who carried the tortillas and scraps of meat and corn soup to them in clay dishes. They ate in silence and with what few eyes dared be seen in that place upon them. The other men and the youths among them spoke amongst themselves but softly and there was no comfort in that drone of noise. They ate and left the clay dishes behind them and let the strangers in that place say what they would about the strangers who had just left them and about their lives and about their deaths.

They took their horses and walked then to the farther edge of town. At this far edge and at the limits of this desert outpost that passed for civilization in this desolate place they found a place that may have once been a shed or once been a barn. Much of the roof had fallen in. The mud walls were sliding back into the dust from which they once came but were held back only by the timbers and reeds that resisted for a time this incessant slide. To what use it was now put was not known nor clear. Chickens and other small fowls roosted in the high rafters and scratched about in the gravel before it. A sow rested in its shade and lumbered away into new shade at their approach. No houses stood nearby. No one was within the place. 

They took this abandoned barn for themselves then and brought the horses blinking into the darkness and coolness found within. They gathered what feed could be found there and drew up what water could be dredged from a cistern and left these things for the horses. The horses stamped and settled and drew up to the water as they themselves drew up to the claytiled bar so soon before. They left the horses there and climbed the lashed and twisted ladder up to the hayloft above and near the opened roof. They roosted here too among the fallen rafters and tumbled thatch.

The sun fell lower yet to the west and burned red in the ruined roof overhead. They watched the gradient colors rise and fade with the coming night and squatted in the darkness and minded their weapons and waited.


	8. Chapter 8

The man lay on his back in the blue darkness of their hiding place. The moon stood watch at its midnight meridian and cast pale echoes of noontime shadows below the things it saw in its turn and course across the sky. The horses breathed in the dark below and snuffled. The white and mud town beyond this sheltering stable was silent. Even the stars were still in their bright places in the firmament. 

El Gato rose in silence according to his art and trade and crept along the floor of that hayloft on his stomach like any kind of vermin and felt in the whole of his progress the shape of the money that he wore in secret beneath his clothes.

He had reached the ladder that would take him down to his horse and saddle when he heard the sound of the hammer of a revolver pulled back and set. 

He looked up and saw in the halfshadow from the windows let into the barn that the man had half risen from his blanket and was propped on his elbow. The man did not move but held his aim.

\--I told you you won't.

El Gato could feel the angle of the revolver as though the barrel were some hollow eye turned balefully in his direction. He did not rise far from his belly but crept back up into the hayloft again with his hand outstretched as though in blessing or adoration but properly in surrender and returned to his own place and his own blanket.

He curled into his place and looked at his companion. His companion returned the look with darkly shining eyes in that dim and moonlit place. They said no more. 

But it was in this silence that passed between them and the silence that bore down on the town around them so heavily as could a storm that they heard a kind of thunder that was not thunder and which was infinitely more dangerous to them than any storm in this mudmade place might be. These were the distant sounds of hoofbeats ringing out against the swelling hills and berms that so walled this fragile town. And these fleeing riders knew well that sound. And they knew that they were not in a country which would shelter them willingly even if there were those within it who would take their money if they would disguise their allegiances. These they knew were the remnants yet still of those loyal to Santa Fe Jack and they would not cease in their pursuit so easily and least of all in territory they held as their own on behalf of their fallen leader. In truth, the man whose loyalty had been bought by their enemy could imagine that now they were led by another man already and he would not let them cease in their pursuit and he would drive them all forward with his sharp and wolfish and glittering eyes narrowed under the brim of his black hat.

El Gato rose again in silence according to his art but with greater haste and both men now fled down that darkened ladder into the deeper blue and heavier darkness that blanketed their horses. The thundering hooves drew nearer. The noise of saddle and of bridle and of bit and of leather strap they could not avoid as they saddled their still wearied horses again. The horses resisted and snuffled against the bridles and at first refused to walk. 

The rolling noise of the oncoming horses slowed and stopped. El Gato and his companion looked at one another in the darkness of their hiding place. Voices could be heard in the plaza beyond. A door was beaten and new voices shouted in answer. Women shouted. More doors were beaten and slammed open. More voices answered these calls. The town awoke in the midnight darkness. 

The man took up his horse's reins and pulled it out of the dark of that shed and into the dark of the night beyond. El Gato followed. The voices and cries came closer like lights flashing in the night. And lamps too began to shine out in the dark and torches with them. 

The two riders now led their horses along and moved behind the low and square houses there at the fringes of this meager town. They moved in parallel and in opposition to those who sought them as best they could. Where these other horses and voices sounded they would find a corner and turn into the next alley and thereby continue to build this puzzle and this labyrinth in between the white adobe houses and hope against hope that it would baffle their pursuers. A brightness fell on them and the air was filled suddenly with the sound and the smell of burning and so they turned to see the stable in which they had rested now burning above and behind them. The night fell upon them blue and the fire burned upon them orange. The last of the ruined thatch roof rose in clouds of flying sparks above the town in poor imitation of the stars and then the first of the beams collapsed. 

Out of that same latent habit, El Gato crossed himself. For seemingly no reason at all, the other man wrapped the ragged scarf again around his neck.

They pulled their horses onward and forever keeping to what shadows they could and forever keeping what walls they could between themselves and those who sought them. But the desert and the night were just at their reach. They turned yet again across the pale moonscape of houses and into a new path when the first shot whistled between them and struck against the mud wall of the house beyond them. Man and beast alike started and sought better cover behind a low wall that bordered the dusty purlieu of these dwellings. 

From there they watched and they waited and the riders squinted into the darkness and readied again their weapons. 

A horse and rider rose up out of the dark like some strange beast materializing out of the night itself. The fire burned yet in the sky behind man and beast and cast a fiendish halo around them both. The rider carried his pistol in his hand and waved it boldly. The man hiding in the dark drew out his own pistol and shot once at the horse's feet. The horse danced in agitation at this new threat. The rider held the animal and recollected himself and swore into the dark. He cast around anew for the two he pursued. El Gato grinned at the man he called amigo there in the dark and the two crept further on. 

The horse and rider so famed by the light and noise of the fire were joined by another. Their long coats hung down across their horses' flanks and waved with each step like the skirted coats of some imagined or dead lords. Bloodworth's wanton ally again kept himself hidden behind wall or corner and aimed his weapon and fired at the horses' feet and made them break their stride and skip with surprise and their riders swear into the dark. And again El Gato grinned and again they moved on.

This time the riders in the dark fired back and struck against the mud walls and their shots skimmed across the brims of the hats of the two men in hiding. Their horses pulled and snorted but were held still. They made no sound. The wall of darkness that ringed the town and bespoke the nearness of the desert beyond was yet closer.

The riders in hiding drew now with horses and all into the arched columns of a colonnade that ringed a house now much removed from its former state and now largely in as much ruin as the stable in which they had of late sheltered. Such was the fate of all such grandeur in these wastelands. They pulled themselves into the hard and parallel shadows cast by the columns and watched between them as their pursuers now dismounted and sought them. They slipped into the light so much as they dared to see and drew back again as swiftly like puppets or toys teasing some child unawares. Such was the game they now played but that with a deadly forfeit.

The man in the shadows studied the smooth white walls around them and the remains of the house beyond. Their pursuers moved slowly in the darkness. He looked above them to the ruins of the roof and then to his companion. El Gato nodded once and let slip half a wicked smile. 

He stood his horse against the colonnade and climbed into the saddle and then stood on his saddle to seek a grip for his hands and feet on that adobe wall. He found his grasp and jumped free of the horse. The man in the shadows took it up and drew back further into the shadow and waited.

With all his skill and all the appearance of his namesake, El Gato wandered the clay rooftops of this place and now crept across the roof of the colonnade and now reached the edge of the house and now drew himself up onto a balcony and now onto the ruins of the collapsed roof. There was yet a hold for him even there. Below him, the two men searched fruitlessly and with their weapons still at hand. The horse stood idle and irritated by the smell of the fire. He paused above them and gauged them as they stood and cast a glance to his cohort in the dark. The man nodded once.

Taking up one of the last of the tiles, El Gato raised it and let it fall into the courtyard below. It all but whistled as it plummeted back to the earth of its origin and shattered with a sound almost like a cry. Both men turned. One fired uselessly and aimlessly. Their horses startled and fidgeted but were kept in place. They looked to the roof in agitation but saw nothing as El Gato crept back from the rim of the roof and waited. One man swore again.

El Gato crept back up to the edge of the roof and raised another tile and let it fall. Again the men below swore and dodge the broken shards of pottery. Again El Gato slipped from sight as they gave the roof a baleful look and now scoured the shadows. 

A third tile followed. But with this he intended a better result. And he let it fall to earth again. But with this last fall there passed between the tile and the ground a man's shoulder upon which the tile broke with all the same shattering sound as on the hard earth but now together with that man's cry. He fell to earth instead. His companion turned to him and tried to raise him and called for the rest.

There was no time. El Gato clambered down again from the rooftop and still unseen. His own companion was mounted again and standing in the shadows with the other horse at the ready. El Gato leapt from rooftop to saddle and even as he did they saw the remains of the horsemen in their pursuit gallop into that colonnaded plaza and stare at the man struck by the rooftile and his shocked indignity at the ordeal even as they found him there. They shouted at one another and milled about in the narrow plaza. Only the Preacher looked with his sharp eyes to the darkness beyond and perhaps only he saw the two horses and two riders running in clouds of silver dust from that place and its useless fire and its broken claytiled rootops and into the darkness and moonlight of the desert beyond and to the east.


	9. Chapter 9

They rode all that night as the horses ran trembling and even they jostled half-sleeping in the saddles. They did not stop nor did they dare stop. They rode that night through forests of saguaro that loomed in the low places along this forgotten trail. The sky had grown overcast in the night and those fluted columns passing in the dark were like the ruins of vast temples ordered and grave and silent save for the soft cries of owls among them. The terrain was thick with cholla and clumps of it clung to the horses with spokes that would drive through a bootsole to the bones within and a wind came up through the hills and all night it sang with a wild viper sound through that countless reach of spines. They rode on and the land grew more spare and they guided themselves by sense and by vague glimpses of the moon as it descended veiled and obscure behind them. 

The sun rose before them in its time, emerging from the hills and mountains distant in a bloodied veil like a wounded and baleful eye. The stones of the desert lay in dark tethers of shadow and a wind was blowing out of the sun where it sat squat and pulsing at the eastern reaches of the earth. They shouldered forward into that burning light. Ahead of them the land already burned in a flat wash that was without tree or even the lost ghost of trees long dead and where only stones could sustain themselves and where the dust itself was ground to finer powder by the relentless wind and heat of the sun. The chucked up their horses and stepped into this sandy plain and there rode for the morning.

The horses stepped lightly on the alien ground as though somehow in fear of disturbing the land itself. They sidestepped and rolled their eyes like circus horses and then would return to their path forward. In the utter austerity of that landscape all shapes and things were given a strange equality and no one thing living or dead or never to live nor die nor bird nor tree nor plant nor animal could make a claim of superiority or ownership. The very clarity of these things inverted their familiarity, for the eye of man understands the whole of a place beginning with some first part and here was nothing brighter than another and nothing more shadowed and in the lucid and luminous democracy of such places all preference is made irrelevant and a man and a stone find between them unexpected and hitherto unknown shared blood. Hunched under their hats the riders seemed fugitives on some grander scale, like beings for whom the sun itself hungered.

In time they began to come upon chains and packsaddles, singletrees, dead mules, wagons. Saddletrees eaten bare of their rawhide coverings and weathered white as bone, a light chamfering of miceteeth along the edges of the wood. They rode through a region where iron will not rust nor tin tarnish. The ribbed frames of dead cattle under their patches of dried hide lay like the ruins of primitive boats upturned upon that shoreless void and they passed lurid and austere the black and desiccated shapes of beasts who had died with their necks stretched in agony in the sand and now upright and blind and lurching askew with scraps of blackened leather hanging from the fretwork of their ribs they leaned with their long mouths howling after the endless tandem suns that passed above them. The riders rode on. They crossed a vast dry lake with rows of dead mountains that ranged beyond it like the works of enormous insects. To the south lay broken shapes of stones from some fallen or ruined mountain as far as they eye could see. Under the hooves of the horses the alabaster sand shaped itself in whorls strangely symmetric like iron filings in a field and these shapes flared and drew back again, resonating upon that harmonic ground and then turning to swirl away over the playa.

This was a place of the lost. The road when it could be called a road was disordered and wandering and it passed through the place aimlessly and guided as much by hope as by desperation. They followed it where they could and abandoned it when there were too many bones to suggest safe passage by this way. The land was flat but it hid much. In the early light and before the distortions of sun and heat and sky could twist the shapes of things or remove them completely the riders could see the rising smoke of the cookfires and smith's forges and small burning things in a town east and aside and this they knew would be Santa Ana.

In sight of this place they then dared stop at a rivulet that wound through the desert. It began in a hillside at the far edge of this dry lakebed now worn to a cliff face and stained the rocks dark where it fell down onto stones worn to their shapes by its persistence. Small things grew here and dared even bloom here in this oasis of a stream on the face of the desert. Farther out it would wear its way into a canyon and disappear into the higher mountains. Here they could reach it and could drink of its water even as it tasted of iron. They watered the horses here and drank jaw to jaw with them. El Gato felt under his clothes to reassure them both that the money he worn was still there. They said nothing because there was nothing to say. The sun rolled above them and the land itself began to waver in the heat but they knew now the turn towards the rising chimney smoke and the place that they sought. The horses drank and they drank and soon they remounted again and pressed forward into that shimmering and alien landscape that lay between them and their penultimate goal. The road gathered strength here and began to make its shape known in the desert and they took to this path and drew forward.

They were still some miles outside of Santa Ana and following those traces that would lead them to that place but yet surrounded by nothing but this selfsame broken stone and ground sand that burned and shimmered in the afternoon light when they saw them: five men in long brown coats and one man all in black. Still these were the same first or the last of Santa Fe Jack's men come to hound them at the last and the Preacher was with them whether by orders of his own or those of another. These six rode behind them now and at a distance and slowly through the gold and blue air and the rising blasts of desert heat. The pattern was now known to all. This would be as a familiar song. They continued on and so did their followers.

What was to follow completed itself as all knew it must. The horses were wearied as were their riders. No measure of water nor pause in the heat could sustain either man or beast for long. How their pursuers maintained their strength and their horses the two fleeing riders did not know. But the pursuit came up quickly and their own horses seemed almost to welcome such an end.

The six riders swept in a galloping cloud of dust and hoof and saddleleather around them and weapons were drawn on all sides. But they were not used. The horses milled and stepped and tossed their heads and El Gato and his dangerous companion put themselves side by side and back to back to face their captors. And so they all entangled themselves with one another with the horses stepping as though this whole encircling were part of some elaborate dance and certain steps must be completed in this unfamiliar quadrille. The horses stilled at last and the men were silent even of the small noises they made to guide those animals. The Preacher stared across the ears of his horse at the man with the red scapular of rags.

\--It's real easy to get lost out here, he said.

El Gato cast an eye over his shoulder and scowled at the Preacher's wicked grin. The man with the red rags said nothing and merely inclined his head to listen. The Preacher spoke again.

\--You'd better come with us before you get lost again.


	10. Chapter 10

With the last riders loyal once to a man named Jack and now loyal it seemed to a man known by a profession that may or may not be his own ranged around their new captives the ragged knot of horse and man made their way down again into a valley that sheltered another town. They passed over the last hill dusted with white sand and low and tenacious scrubs of grass and brush and looked at last on the town that they had sought and that they had wished to see but in another set of circumstances.

Santa Ana lay spread before them in this low plain and spread from the strengthening river at its heart of which their fortunate stream had been merely a tributary. Half built of earth and half built of wood and with the twin bright sunlit stains of the railroad irons streaking away from the far edge of the town and again farther north and south again the town sustained itself as had Clifton Mesa and as did so many other such towns. The daubed walls stood nearly ruinous in their age and bespoke the roots of the town and the slow invasion of other settlers and other lands into this same territory. And now the white adobe houses pressed their clay sides against the raw and unpainted wooden bones of flatfronted structures with their high porches and glass windows. Their chimneys though rose and smoked alike in the air and below them there stirred in the shadows the people themselves and their animals as they dodged the heat of the day and of the sun. This town was the greater of the two when raised against Clifton Mesa or so spoke the angled streets and cottages and vague signs of women's hands in the places to be seen in the streets. In the bright distance at the edge of this town and nearly obscured alike by dust and heat and smoke stood a grander house built up out of lumber dragged by railroad and by mule to stand up in such halfpainted disarray as though such grandeur had been brought whole from the great cities far to the east and unceremoniously deposited in this desolate land. One conical turret rose from one corner and pieced carvings that seemed like nothing so much as lace draped from the eaves and railings. This house stood dark in the distance as a hill unto itself.

They were brought by this antagonistic escort down to another such empty stable that stood at the edge of this town. There were none here to fear nor to adore the tattered long coats they wore. They were not stopped nor were they encouraged. But they seized for themselves this place and passed out of the sunlight and into the black shadows within it.

They took El Gato and the man still wearing his red scapular down from their horses and tied their hands and stripped them of their weapons and led them to a beam hewn out of some great tree that had not grown in such a place as this but which was brought to raise the roof of just such a town and just such a stable and there tied them again to this beam and left them. The horses were tied likewise to one such beam and left to stand with each one his rider's pistolbelt hanging from the horn of his saddle as though almost in mockery. The sunlight slanted in golden beams into this place and interrupted the order the darkness so wished to impose. The five men and the Preacher moved about in this place for a time and stepped around the pools of light left by the sun on the dirt and straw and silvered wood as though they were somehow perilous or some inverted well or depth. They stepped over El Gato and the other man as though they were objects they were going to abandon in their departure. After a time they did depart but left one man behind and hidden in the shadows that still spilled across the narrow door to watch over these two captives. In their places still bound and crouched on the floor they did not move. After a while even the guard fell asleep.

The sun slanted further against that dim place and the blue of evening slowly slid in to replace the gold of the sunlight. In the dimness then El Gato made to struggle against his bonds but the man tied with him held fast and did not move. El Gato pulled more fiercely and whispered hotly in the cooling evening.

\--Amigo, you want to get yourself killed, you may be my guest. But for me--

El Gato pulled against the ropes again and only then did the man speak.

\--You sit tight.

He held fast still and when his struggles prove futile and his wrists were now pulled raw and his hands were swollen El Gato too fell into stillness. And so they waited. 

After a while the five men returned and collected their companion. They came with lamps which burned golden again in that stable as the sun had all afternoon. They moved away from that place and down to another shed that stood some distance away. The man in the red scarf could see the lamps as they moved and could see too the distant building that stood blue itself in the still bluer night. They came back again and smelled of whiskey and of food and of women. Some carried bottles in their fists. But they came only for the man bearing that red mark on his neck. They made him stand again and separated him from his companion and led him out and left El Gato again tied to that great beam set to hold the roof.

They passed him around among themselves in the dim light in that other shed of a stable. The lamps pooled their yellow glow on the floor in patches like lost pieces of the heat of the afternoon and the dust rose into the lamps' unblinking eyes. They passed him around among themselves by fists and blows and in whatever direction he staggered like a man drunken and reeling there was another blow to meet him.

The Preacher did nothing but stood in the shadows cast by the dryrotted sides of a stall and leaned against these same sides and smoked his pipe and smiled around the stem of it. The smoke curled around his ears and gathered under the brim of his flatcrowned hat.

In moments when his sense returned to him and his balance was in his favor the beaten man would swing at the five against him and as often as he would swing he would also hit and draw bruises or blood or curses from the man he struck. But he was paid for it equally or greater as the blows fell in retaliation against him came harder and faster and wilder like driving rain or thrown stones. He spat blood and it lay where it fell dark on the dirt floor and soon to be drawn into the dust itself.

When he fell they kicked at him and when he rose or when the let him rise or when they dragged him to his feet they would strike him again.

He fell against and looked up to see the Preacher standing over him and smiling. One of the men in his long brown coat reached to stand the beaten man on his feet again but the preacher but his bootheel and ankle on the fallen man's shoulder and would not hear of their raising him again. 

\--You beat him to death and you won't get that money. 

\--He didn't even have a quarter of it with him. Neither did that other one.

Two of them made to raise the fallen man again but the Preacher left his dark boot still against his shoulder and would not move it and so fended them off in their hunger for blood or for gold.

\--I know, the Preacher said. He breathed smoke into the still air again.

\--Whadyou mean, Preacher?

\--I mean he's hidden it. The both of them have. Out there in the desert. And he leaned over the fallen man where he lay and he leered at him. Haven't you?

The man said nothing but lay where he had fallen and did not move. He breathed in the dust and lay still.

\--Nobody but lunatics and idiots try to cross that desert like they did. Unless they got a good reason. This one might not tell us, but the other one will. Make sure this one doesn't get loose and we'll get an answer out of them sooner or later.

They pulled him across the disturbed dust and roaming bits of straw to an empty stall and there bound him again and left him to bleed and for the bruises they had made to now blossom and pool in their dark way across his face and shoulders. Still he said nothing but he breathed and he waited. All departed the save for the Preacher who stood a long moment in the door of the stall and studied him and smiled in his sharp way. Then he too took his leave and took with him the last of the lamps. 

He heard their footsteps as they crossed the space between that cavernous barn and this tiny stable. He heard the creak of the door and a crackling laugh. For a moment there hung in the air a new and terrible silence. And then that silence was broken with a shout.

\--He ain't there. That other one ain't there.

They came at a rush back to the stall in which the man crouched tied and they held their lamps over him and demanded to know where the thief had gone. The man returned their stares with one eye swelling towards shut and with blood in the corner of his mouth. He said nothing. The Preacher stood again in the doorway and measured the man before him. The man offered nothing nor demanded anything. The Preacher smiled again his sharp and wolfish smile and then called to the gathered men on either side.

\--Get the horses. He won't be far.

With the fragile light of the lamps they departed again into the depths of the night and left him in the blackness and blue moonlight of that stable and he heard the sound of their horses again as they ran down in the dark.

Above him some height was cut into the wall a small window. It let in neither the sight of the moon nor the moon's light but through it the injured man could yet detect the diffuse glow of that same moon as it raced against the night and the clouds in its voyage. He considered his hands in that dim light and the knots around his wrist.

Two horses now returned at a soft walk. He squatted in the dark stall and waited. A shadow passed between him and the distant glow of the moon and he turned to the window. A figure crouched there like some strange bird or some misshapen owl come now to this stable to roost. With agility nigh simian and nigh feline the figure unfurled itself in the dark and descended with strange and shadowed elegance down to the rotted straw in the stall. It flashed a smile. The man raised his battered head and looked at him in the dim light with dim eyes. A horse snuffled from beyond the wall of the stable. El Gato laughed in his humming way down in his throat and his teeth were bright in the darkness. 

\--And this is why you have made a partnership with El Gato.

\--No. No partnership. Just get me out of here.


	11. Chapter 11

The moon now slid down westward again in the darkened track of the sun and now lodged between the corners and eaves of the houses and in the hollow of the hills of the desert over which the riders had passed. They led their horses now as quietly as they could down through those silent and pale streets of darkened and sleeping town. They bade the horses walk slowly and covered their heads when they snuffled and they kept to the soft dirt and rubbish at the sides of the streets. Still wearied, they crouched in the shadow of some house or shop and took shelter there as though it were the sun instead of the moon that shone upon them and shared between them what water they had.

The stable and barn and place of their captivity were behind them though they were not far. They had pulled themselves out into the alleyways and streets of Santa Ana but they were far yet from the grand house at the far side of the town. They knew this was their proper goal and that this was the house of Bloodworth's brother. 

The man with the red scarf wiped now and then at the bleeding places at his mouth with that scarf. His wounds began to clot. All around them both they heard the galloping hooves of the six men who pursued them. They looked up into the air as if to scent these noises rather than to hear them. The echoes returned and returned again from the hillsides and the still air around the town. El Gato touched at the money he still carried under his clothes and turned at last to the man and horse beside him and whispered in the dark.

\--I led them a long way, Amigo. They will follow the horse without finding it. And he patted the shoulder of his horse. 

\--Not long enough, the amigo answered.

The noise of the hooves and the jangling of metal in bridle and saddle now came closer and the source of the sound in the darkness pulled itself free from the echoes and swept back down into the town. Both men turned behind them and towards the stable once more. A shout rose up or a kind of oath that struck the dark air and fell again. The two riders in shadow fell silent and still and waited. 

The noise of the hooves returned again but now at a slow and brooding walk that made the sound of each step a rumbling heartbeat and a noise more felt than heard. First there came one such pattern of thrumming strikes and then another and then a third. With them came no voices but only these drumming footfalls of the horses and the very earth vibrated like a snare drum.

The two hidden riders and their hidden treasure rose then and moved then against and with these riders in the dark. They led their horses still but stepped when they heard these stalking horses step and stilled when they heard them still. And so each became the echo of the other and the silence that fell when all seen and unseen were stilled was as deep as the night that stretched away over them as the moon still sank lower behind the stony hills. 

El Gato and his amigo pressed against the whitewashed walls of a darkened alley and the moonlight slanted over them and they watched in this inverted half-light as a man in a long coat walked his horse quietly across the mouth of the alley and then down the street again. Another set of hoofbeats matched and mirrored this first rider and another of their enemies now passed the other opened end of the narrow alley. They watched with eyes shining in the dark as he passed. 

Following by ear then the rhythm of their steps, they pulled their horses along and across the street through which this second rider had passed and into another narrow passage between shop and store and house and moved thereby nearer to the far side of this tumbled town and its palatial house. 

They held their ground as the riders that had passed them now doubled back and turned new corners in their search. They came with a determination of duty and with the undeterred force of and storm that swept across the plains in that same country. They were as certain in their path and as foreboding. The two men in hiding looked at one another and held their breath and their horses and waited. 

The two riders in their long coats now joined each other's tracks and turned again to find one another standing at either end of one such narrow crossing between roads. One man nearly swore but held his tongue and breathed hot into the night air. They turned together into the street and made their way back down. 

Following his companion's lead now, El Gato pulled his horse and the money still sewn and tucked into his clothes and his wicked life which he held perhaps too dear for its worth out and into the wide and empty street now void for the moment of their enemies. They walked in tandem to their opponents on the far side of the silent and roughhewn structures with all the darkened windows shuttered like lidded eyes or gaping like hollow eyesockets. And so they willed the footsteps of their foes to mask their own. 

A third horse now approached and they willed themselves and their animals into silence and held to the shadows in the street as this new rider passed before them at a crossroads in that town. And as he passed they stepped again as echoes to his footfalls and when he stopped they stilled again.

So passed the the last of that long night in Santa Ana as all men and all their horses wound themselves in search through the labyrinthine streets of that town. The false echoes and false answers now bounded away down a new alley or some dusty and forgotten passage between two neighbors or not crossed over a low daubed wall and then went on. Each man now chased and now hid within shadows. Each man cast his ears to the night and willed himself to hear beyond the sound of his own horse. But the night sheltered all in that place and those who were hunted were hidden and those who did the hunting did not find them nor were the roles thereby reversed as well all knew they might be in these dark streets. And so El Gato and the man with the red scarf passed through both the night and the winding streets of this strange town with no direction but only with intention and they made their way now at the last towards the far reaches of this town and the twin spokes of the railroad lines that lay like bright ribbons in the daylight. And now at the last there were the small and dry calls of the birds that had sheltered under the eaves of these same houses along with them in that strange night and those same cries which foretold the coming dawn.

As ever the sun rose through its red haze and pulsated already with heat and dust as though the sun itself were the heat of some monumental beast or god now slaughtered and eviscerate upon the eastern earth.

In that rose and golden light as the stars faded and the first calls from dogs and barnyard fowls now sounded in the air they knew that there would be no such merciful shelter in the shadows for them. But before them there stood the massive and turreted silhouette of the horse they had seen from the hillside but the day before. It rose before them even now like the shape of some forgotten mountain in the early dawn.

The man in the red scarf turned at last again to El Gato. The wounds on his face had staunched now and his swollen eye was ringed in black pooled blood but was open again. El Gato returned his look. They stood in the rising light with the shadows of very stones in the street around them now etched in the last shreds of the night's darkness like the long shadows of canyons on the moon and they stood at a rail before the shut door of a dramhouse not so unlike the one in which their paths had first crossed and each had been unaware. They tied their horses to the rail and turned again to the mansion in the desert.

Between them and the sweep of stairs that led to the porch and door of that place there lay a wide plaza half paved in stone and half left to the mercy of the desert dust. The halfpaved plaza was too ringed with the flat and grandiose porches of places of business and of buying and selling but all ratlike and sniveling and promising much with paint and colored glass. These things they ignored as they stepped into that wide plaza and into the stormlike halfshadows of the grand house and the false and painted buildings still carved and set up with the same raw wood that had built Clifton Mesa and any of the myriad such towns that clung to the railroad's iron path for life. The wind was rising with the dawn and now the dust whipped itself in low eddies and dancing spirals that moved ghostlike now across the plaza. 

The wind too lifted the long red scarf of the man who stood there before the house and waiting. He stood idle and took one of the harsh and stubby cigarillos that he always carried in his pocket out and put it in his teeth and lit it and tossed the match away and then his hand hung loosely from his shoulder and at the butt of his pistol but it did not move. So he stood with his scarf now moving according to the will of the wind and El Gato now came and stood some distance away but yet along side him. His fingers twitched against the hilt of his pistol and his eyes searched the fleeing shadows.

The man adjusted the cigarillo against his teeth and blew smoke into the wind and now took a step further into the plaza.

And then there came the first footfall and the first ring of spurs and from behind the corners and from the alleys all alongside of those painted and ornamented shops came men both known and unknown and racing the morning in their long and dusty and buckskincolored coats. They stepped to the edge of that same halfpaved and windswept and abandoned plaza and they waited. Each man in his way held to his weapon.

At the last there came a man in a long black coat unlike his fellows' and a black flatcrowned hat not much seen in that country. He stepped from beyond and behind these others and took his place in the ring of them at the eastern side of that plaza with the castellated house at his back and the man in the red scarf before him. 

Nothing was said. Nothing need be said. Stillness now reigned and would keep such dominion until one many or another broke it and moved and in that movement there would likewise come bloodshed and death. Such was the fragile balance that now bound these enemies together in such a web across this square in a town removed from the territory claimed either by one or by the sign worn by the other. Such was the balance held to such a point as though on the tip of a needle and bearing on it all the weight of life and death. 

Nothing need be said. Enough was known. That each had chased the other to this point and to what purpose was clear enough. Things now were known without having to be said. The money was with them in that moment and all knew it though some could not say with certainty where. But it was enough to know that the prize for such a race through the desert and the dark was present in that moment. The house outside of Clifton Mesa now breathed the stink of death if there were any to brave that slaughter and seek to bury the dead. If there were any left. The coyotes would have come in small sorties and the vultures would have followed and would have soon perched along the ridge of the roof with their shoulders rounded and their wings outstretched like dark and demonic bishops and now the nightmare beasts of the desert would have feasted in that house by the spring and the strongbox that had held dear the heart of that house and of this same pending battle lay still open and gaping at the raw wooden ceiling. A fine sweat broke across the brows of some of the men there gathered in that circle. The silence was kept.

The wind blew in that place still. The shadows and the sunlight moved yet against the dust and the rawboned rooftops and eaves. There was stillness amidst the wind.

Against the wind there came the small and sharp sound of the hammer of a pistol being drawn back. All heard it and all knew the meaning implicit in such a sound on the air: the stillness was now broken.

There were two shots. A man in a long coat sprawled back into the air with his limbs splayed as though almost in ecstasy. The hammer of his pistol was set back. But his hand had not even cleared the holster for his pistol. His bullet had bust through the leather and then struck against the ground uselessly. He fell in the dust and lay still. 

The silence returned but now the seven who remained stood rigid and ready and cast about at one another. Even the Preacher now reached across to his weapon. So they stood and each now waited for another to move. 

It was El Gato now who spun on his heels and turned his silver pistol towards two men who stood against a painted porch railing. They stood and stared and one dared move his hand. El Gato fired but badly. Both men staggered and one fell against the railing but the other kept his feet. He moved to fire again when the man beside him shot twice and both men collapsed and now lay still and staring at the morning sun in that faultless sky. 

Again the silence returned. Now there ranged on the man's right two men in their long coats and still the Preacher before him. Now he stood and breathed smoke into the morning air and held his grip on his pistol and waited again.

There was a shot and a spark.

Behind him the man heard the thief called El Gato fall into the dust with a cry. He dared turn and saw blood flowing from the thief's shoulder and onto the stones beneath him. He turned again to see the blue gunsmoke drifting from the pistol of one of the men there in the plaza with him. He was still halfcrouched in the act of firing and yet drawing himself back up when he too sprawled into the air and fell. The man in the red scarf pulled back his weapon again and held it at his shoulder and readied it.

El Gato mumbled something. His pistol was yet in his hand. He said something more and then began to fall still.

Now they were three ranged in that square and they pulled themselves free from the fallen and stepped over them and better set themselves into the shape of this which would perhaps be the last volley amongst them. The man in the red scarf halfsmiled to himself and set his pistol back into its holster and let his hand rest there on his thigh beside it and he looked at the last of his two enemies.

The blood in the street all around them was already beginning to congeal and the wounds of the dead were already beginning to clot uselessly. The wind blew but softly now and the sun was yet rising in its inexorable course. The shadows still fell across them and their shadows stood now amidst the shadowy crenelations of that turreted house as though in flight above the place itself like so many vultures and crows themselves. The dust moved in eddies about their feet and still and again they waited. 

The sound was soft this time. No pistols were cocked with their ringing metallic hammers to familiar to those who knew the sound of their own. No shots were yet fired. But there came the soft sound of iron as it slid against stiff leather. And in that same instant there came the matched and parallel sound of the same but that followed by a shot. The man in the red scarf stood stiff and halfcrouched with his pistol still at his hip and at the ready and he watched as the last man in his brown duster fell into the street and lay still.

The Preacher spun on his heels with his hand now at the butt of his own pistol and the man in the red scarf met his stare but the Preacher did not draw and he did not move further.

The Preacher dared something almost like a grin and his eyes narrowed against sunlight and stinging grit glittered.

Again the man put his pistol away and stood almost at ease and almost in idleness with his hand against his thigh. He stood and let his head loll to the side and he looked at the Preacher through his own narrowed eyes.

Again there came a soft and pained voice from down in the dust behind him. But he did not turn and he did not answer.

The Preacher alike took his hand from his weapon and pulled himself up to his height and tossed back the long tails of his black frock coat and left his hands at his hips. 

In this way did these two men come at last to know one another. Strangers to the last by name but each known to the other by his stance and by his face and by the way he carried his weapon and by the way he used it. That was enough to know another in such a circumstance.

They stood this way with their feet set into the earth as though they were rooted to the place and regarding one another as the sun still crept higher in its track and as the horses now grew restless at the tense silence and as the town itself began to dare to peer through shutters and curtains to see if what they had expected to be the inevitable begun the night before had at last come to pass and completed itself. But there was stillness yet for a moment more in this pause in this square.

Far beyond them from this stillpoint they knew that the towns once named as territory of one man or another were free now. Perhaps the house at the spring would be burned. Perhaps the blood would be washed from the floor and the wood used for some other house in some other place. Perhaps the desert caves and canyon cliffs where Santa Fe Jack had lived in hiding would be left to the desert and the dust and the coyotes. Perhaps there would be another man and another man and another man in an endless sequence each to take up the mantle of the one before him as the one before him died at the hands of his foe. Each man would claim his territory and each man would stand against his foe and there would be an infinite number of these same moments of stillness in similar squares and in streets and along those same ribbons of railroad tracks and down in the sides of canyons and out in the alkali flats of forgotten playa and in saloons and dramhouses and whorehouses and in the ruins of houses and in places unknown and unseen and unimagined yet by man. This stretching about them in this moment was perpetuity of a kind and the immortality of an idea if not of a man.

Or perhaps in these moments man's blood called out for man's blood and it was nothing new that spoke in that silence where the wind blew and dervishes of dust scuttled between them and skipped across the stones. Perhaps the house of carnage each had entered and departed in the course of things from Clifton Mesa to this place in the track of blood to blood and even in the work of a brother to a brother that is blood to blood was that ancient movement within a man that those silvered and peeling houses and facades of artifice that are put up in these wastelands are meant somehow to stem or staunch or stand against. That the truth of the place as in a man himself is wilderness and the wilderness will yet gather unto itself what is its own. These houses with all their ornamentation bear no meaning to sky and earth and wind. The beasts of the desert who now feasted in the painted rooms where once Richard Bloodworth entertained with his family those who might somehow be named with significance amongst those in Clifton Mesa and beyond and who now feasted on that selfsame man and others of his blood and oath were in the right in this place and man was here among them. They lapped at the spilled blood with relish. This was the nature of things. The ornamentation even to El Gato's silver pistol now glittering in his stretched hand in the sun was the same false front that stood above these same simpering stores for delicate and wasteful things propped by beams and timber and which implied without proof some notion of civility. But it was flat and it was false. Civility itself in these places is something carried to them and created there and sustained only by the willful force of those who have carried it there and sought to graft it into a land which will not of its own accord have it because it is a land which cannot sustain it. And that was this country.

And in these moments measured out by the red meat of the muscle of the heart there was something true. Truth implies not rightness nor righteousness but there is truth in truth. 

The dust moved around them and the blood of enemies and comrades lay in that same dust. Such was the day. They gritted their teeth against the stinging dust and now each man, the Preacher and the man wearing still those red rags watched only one another. They were alone in the world as though it were made for them alone and as though they were the first and last of men to stand upon it. 

They stood. They watched. Their hearts beat and their hands waited and they stilled themselves to seek some signal that would pass between them and which would mean both life and death.

They stilled themselves.

Both men fired. 

The wind still stirred the red scapular of rags worn around the stranger and newcomer's neck. As before it was also now: the bullet pierced that long and tattered rag and left its mark there but not on the man himself. He did not move nor flinch nor turn his head. The bullet passed through and behind him and struck against the wall of the adobe house behind him and left a cloud of white dust. And the man stood yet in the street there before the house of the brother of the man who had bought his loyalty for a time.

And the man called The Preacher now fell into the dust as any man would and his blood flowed as any man's would and he died as any man would and as all men must and if he bore the weight of sins then he carried them even then. He fell and lay on his back but with his head turned as if to regard his right hand as it lay tossed alongside his head. His pistol tumbled away again into the dust and lay still and smoking.

So ended then the long stillness between these two foes and so would soon begin another for another man and his foe.

The man settled again the cigarillo in his teeth. He inspected the red rag where the shot had passed through and then stepped into the center of the plaza to see for himself the death of this man.

A shot skimmed across that stony ground and all but struck sparks from his spurs as he stood now in the middle of the plaza. He turned first to see one of the men who had been sprawled against the railing of that carved porch now fall again with blood in his mouth and a pistol in his hand and he turned again to see the thief called El Gato still on his side in the dirt but grinning across the dust of the plaza with his engraved and shining pistol held in a trembling hand outstretched before him and admiring his handiwork even now. 

The man cast him another halfsmile in return before El Gato's own grin faded and his head fell again into the dust.


	12. Chapter 12

When the man and thief called "El Gato" awoke he found he was yet still alive.

He found first that he could see the halfpaved plaza below him through panes of leaded and colored glass. The dust had blown again across the bloodied places where the six men taken by the six bullets in that man whose name he had not known nor ever known had lain. The dust had covered the bloodied place in which he too had fallen. His shoulder pained him. He stirred and turned to see how it was that he had lived.

His shoulder was bandaged. The shot had passed through the meat of his shoulder and out again. The sheets of the bed in which he found himself were damp still with his sweat and his shoulder pained him but he had yet lived.

He turned again to the room beyond and found there a man in a long tan coat and yet with a tattered red cloth tossed around his neck and draped across his shoulders. This man leaned in the doorway and smiled at the thief. 

El Gato scowled proudly.

\--I told you once, amigo: if you want to get yourself killed, you may be my guest, but you--

He would have risen at this man but in trying to lift himself from his bed he irritated his unhealed wound again and he succumbed again and collapsed gently against the folded blankets that bolstered him up.

\--You're not near mended yet.

\--And it is your fault that I am not, Amigo.

The man smiled again that same crooked halfsmile. He drew out another of those same harsh cigarillos from his pocket and lit it in his cupped hands and tossed the spent match into the cold fireplace. He set it in his teeth and spoke around it.

\--I almost forgot. I have something for you.

He took down from his shoulder a pair of saddlewallets swollen with unknown and unseen parcels. From one he withdrew bundles wrapped in scraps of linen and knotted bags that jingled gently and brightly as he laid them at the foot of the bed. Satisfied with this delivery then the man stood back again and smiled that same halfsmile again.

El Gato would forget or forgo any mention of the pain of his shoulder and arm to unwrap those bundles. He knew now their contents for he had borne much of it tied under his clothes and sewn up in linen bundles alike. Unknotting and untying then he spilled the coin and paper money alike across the white linens of his bed and let the money lay in the valleys and mountains there about his feet as his hands drifted in pleasure and awe over them.

\--Even shares, the man said. That's what a partnership is.

The wounded thief looked up at him and set his hands clawlike and cautionary over the money. The man repacked the saddlewallets and slung them again over his shoulder. He tipped his head one last time to the thief there before him.

\--Adios.

El Gato in reply said nothing and the man turned and the sound of his boots and his spurs followed him down the long and hollow stairs. There were voices for a moment and then quiet again.

From the window down on that plaza below now El Gato could see the man whose name he had not known in these strange days take his leave of the house and mount his horse again. He could see him hang back in their place the packed saddlewallets. And he could see that this man's horse stood next to his own there before the stairs contained in their delicate and ornamented railings at the foot of the grand and terrible house in which he now lay in recovery. The promise of the will had been kept and the money now delivered and now split between they three: El Gato, this still unknown and unseen brother, and this man whose name he would not know. It was as had been promised. There was nothing more in this course of things.

The man with the red rags around his neck now turned his horse to the west and drew off from his neck again those red rags. They yet blew in that perpetual wind that this corner of Santa Ana so drew unto itself. He folded them and pressed them alike into his saddlewallet and chucked up his horse and set it to the west again.

The dust of that country hung in the air behind him for a moment and then it too faded again.

The man called "El Gato" gathered up again the coin that was now rightfully his own and knotted it again into its bundles and its bags and settled it behind the pillow and thought then for a time in which direction it would please him most to go when he had had his fill of the kindness of this house so due him in his injury and his help. 

When the man called "El Gato" departed again it would be of his own choosing.


End file.
